Color Flash Filters, the D.I.Y Way!

Do your night-time shots long to be bathed in glorious technicolor? Do your indoor photos lack a much-needed burst of intense saturation? Do you not have a high-enough paying job to buy a Coloursplash flash? If the answer to all of the above questions was a resounding ‘YES’, then this is the solution for you! But be warned, your snaps will never be the same again…they will be dripping from top to bottom with glowing splashes of luminous COLOR!

The idea I had was to use readily available household items to make a very effective set of colour filters for your camera’s built-in flash. It just goes to show that you don’t need to spend all of your hard earned pennies to get exciting results!

For this cheap and very cheerful tip, you will need the following:

• A sheet of card.
• Scissors and/or a scalpel.
• Clear one-sided sticky tape.
• Colourful Sharpie pens, ink cartridges, felt-tip pens…anything to add colour to the tape!
• Blu-tack.

Measure the flash on your camera (or just guess the size), then cut a rectangle from your sheet of card a few millimeters bigger than the actual flash size so you can cut the middle out, which will now act as your filter window. Now get your sticky tape and wrap a layer around the front and back of your card rectangle, making sure you cover all of the window area and the sticky part of the tape! Here comes the fun part, color in both sides of the tape using whatever you’ve found that will stain your transparent plastic glass! Sharpie pens work well, but I also got good results using a cotton bud to brush ink from a fountain pen cartridge onto the tape, just be creative and you will find something that works well for you! The more layers of tape and colour you add, the stronger the filter will be, so go wild.

All that is left to do now is to stick the filter over your flash using a small amount of blu-tack on each corner, and there you have it…D.I.Y colour filters! Experiment with different colours and patterns, and if your camera has a rear curtain sync function (like the Fisheye 2 for example) try making filters for any external hotshoe flash’s you use. This can make for some crazy double colourflash exposures, or use both flashes at the same time with different coloured filters for some face-melting gradients! The more fun you have, the better results you will get.

Go nuts!

written by minty on 2009-12-19 #gear #tutorials #diy #filters #tipster #cheap #color-flash #fisheye #colour-flash #home-made