I’ve always wanted a softbox, but I am also tight, so It was either buying a cheap one, or in true Strobist style, making one. Lastolite make foldable softboxes for hot-shoe flashes, so I took a quick look at those. They come in two flavors, 15×15″ and 24×24″. The smaller of the two is £83.50…

Right, DIY it is.

First, some design considerations;

• Needs to be portable
• Needs to look half good
• Ideally be able to fit both my Nikon Flashes
• Collapsible/Foldable and quick to set up
• Cheap

With the above in mind, that ruled out ones made from cardboard and tin foil or foam core. Yes, these work pretty well, and for the most part are hard to tell what they are made from, but they ain’t exactly portable or transportable. Another quick Google bought up a design some dude had made using a food umbrella for keeping flies off.  This seemed to be along the right kind of tracks, although he doesn’t say now big it is, or how to attach to a stand.  Anyhoo, I went out to my local Stuff shop and bought the biggest square food umbrella they had, then went over to my local fabric suppliers. There I found some material that had a spooky similarity to the stuff used in my silver reflective umbrella, so I bought a meter of it, as well as meter of black and white suit lining, one for the backing, the other as the diffuser on the front.

Construction was pretty easy, opened the umbrella and traced out 4 panels in the silver stuff, pinned then sewed them together to get the correct shape. Removed the netting and cut off the 4 plastic things that attached the netting to the umbrella frame, and sewed them on to the silver stuff. Did exactly the same for the black material, then sewed the two umbrella shaped bits together and thats that. Somehow I forgot to allow a hole for the flash, so had to kind of bodge that. Ah well. Cut out a square in the white material, then Velcroed that to the outside of the softbox. My sewings a bit shoddy, but on the whole it turned out ok, did get a seam backwards though…

Attaching the thing to the flash/light stand was the next step. I wanted it to be attached to the light stand directly, not attached to the flash, so got around that by removing the central plastic thing that erects the umbrella, and replaced that with a M5 bolt. I then made a speed-ring type affair out of a plastic chopping board. To attach to the light stand I sourced an adjustable joist bracket from B&Q, so its adjustable for different flashes. Thats about it really, the pics explain more…

Costs;

Umbrella – £1.99
Material & thread- £10.20 (ish)
Chopping board – £3.00
Velcro – £1.50
Adjustable bracket – £2.00 (probably was a bit cheaper, I lost the receipt )
M5 bolt & nut – 17p

Total cost; £18.86, quite a lot cheaper than the Lastolite, For the record mine is 18×18″…

I now have plans to make more things… stay tuned

More pics…

My Sigma APO 100-300mm f4 EX IF HSM (to give its full name) came back repaired a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve shot with it, er twice so far… This was the 2nd time out, still in the ‘rigorous testing stage’ to see if its worth hanging on to or part-exing for a Nikon 70-200mm f2.8. So far it looks like its staying.

The original problem was that it had an odd blurry soft focus to it that got worse the more it was zoomed. Now its fixed, its nice and sharp, even at 300mm. Contrast is acceptable, but in my opinion, not as good as the Nikon 70-200mm, but nothing a slight ‘S’ curve cant fix. Did some quick headshots last week, and at 300mm and f/8-9 it was simmilar in sharpness to my 50mm f/1.8 at f/8-9. Nice. I’ll do some more portraits with it soon, and see how it turns out. Focus is pretty fast on my D200, can’t remember how fast the 70-200 was as I really have better things in life to worry about, and as I mostly shoot models, as long as they don’t go running about all over the place, then the fact it takes however many 1000ths of a second more than something else dosn’t really worry me.

As a nice hard test I chased seagulls about at Freshwater Bay with my camera set to Continous focus. The result is poseted  below, had 3 shots sharp, the other 5/6 the focus missed. The autofocus is a touch on the slow side, I cant really tell if its any faster on my F5, to be honest I don’t really care. After a gap of about 3 years, its nice to be able to use a telephoto again. As this sounds like a mini-review, I give my Sigma 100-300 f/4 a rating of 4/5.

Not that you can really tell at this size as most things looks sharp at 600px, but this was actually damn sharp…

D200, 1/1000 @ f/9, iso 100, 300mm