For about a year and a half now I’ve had three stainless steel bowls from the poundland store on Western Road that I figured could one day make some sort of a DIY strobe modification.

With a bit of spare time on my hands I put together this DIY beauty dish with the design based on one I had almost bought in Perth before the wedding. I didn’t end up using flash during the wedding photoshoot because I didn’t have the confidence and worried I’d spend far too much time faffing about and trying to get it right.

When I got back to Brighton I made up this one:

Please ignore the jagged edges in the top left pic, I didn’t have any tin-snips so just used a drill to cut out the flaps. Hence why my flash is covered in tape to stop it getting scratched. Somehow I managed to fluke the hole size because the flash fits in tightly and doesn’t wobble at all.

The spray paint job looks good but is actually quite rubbish – within a few days I imagine it will be scratched up quite badly – I should have used a metal primer – my bad – I was being lazy and cheap.

It’s all spray-painted white except for the underside of the middle piece, I guess ideally I should get some sort of a small convex mirror and put it on the underside but I would have no idea where to find one that small.

The bottom left and right pictures (above) show the velcro I had put on initially to hold the ripstop nylon cover in place – I’m still experimenting as to which I prefer, with or without the nylon. Though I guess now that I’ve painted the inside white, I would be losing more light by putting the nylon cover on too.

Top two pics are with the nylon cover in place. Bottom two are without it. I don’t have another camera to take a picture of how it fits on the camera, but it worked out to be an almost perfect size. On my nifty fifty the front of the dish drops slightly in front of the lens, but doesn’t show up in the photos – which is perfect because then the dish is sort of pointing straight into your face. With a longer lens, the dish is maybe pointing a little upwards.

Below are a few shots taken with it: