Our video light was nigh unusable, delivering a pronounced hot spot in the image. Although Epoque does make a diffuser for the light, we were unable to order one in the US. This ended up being a great opportunity to improvise a diffuser for this light.

After testing several materials by shining an underwater flashlight through them in the dark, I found that the lid to the container that is used locally for take out Chinese soup and Indian food. This translucent plastic does a good job diffusing the light without cutting down the brightness too much. It can at least handle the temperature of hot food, and is soft and easy to work with.

Here is the red filter that threads into the front of the video light and the homemade diffuser:

Because the material is thin, it fits easily inside the threaded filter, making it easy to attach to the light itself. Here is the light with the diffuser and red filter:

This worked so well, I decided to add the same diffusers to our mini dive lights. I simply used smaller circles of the plastic and inserted them between the bulb unit and the front window of our dive lights:

I used a couple extra-large rubber bands to affix these dive lights to the strobe on one arm of this camera setup, the other arm holding the video light. The resulting system has three diffused lights with minimal hot spots in the video image:

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Fruits Gear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.