RAW Collection

At this point you may be asking what it a snoot? Well, a snoot is a device you attach to your flash to produce a narrow beam of light rather than flooding the entire frame with light. It can be used to illuminate a single object while the rest of the frame is exposed using natural light. It can be made in various ways, a tube of fabric or a block of corrugated plastic both work well. Anyway I read an article on www.diyphotography.net some time ago about making a snoot. At the time I did not have an off-camera flash but the idea stuck with me.

Several months after reading the article (late Janury 2010) I set about making my own snoot and did so without re-reading the post. I pickup a A4 piece of felt from HobbyCraft along with a length of velcro for around £2.

I stitched two pieces of velcro to the fabric on opposites sides so I could make a tube of material around my flash. It was quite simple to make and it is adjustable so it fits onto other flash guns just as well. The difference compared to the design on www.diyphotography.net is that it doesn’t always produce a circular tube for light, although this may not be a negative point. Quite often the tube is ecliptic and can be moulded to some degree.

As you can see only a fraction of light escapes through the material and most of the light is directed to the subject. A few improvements could be made. I though about lining the inside with white fabric (although this may make the lower power setting more powerful) and adding a length of wire to the open end of the fabric. This would allow me to shape the end of the snoot into more suitable shapes.

I used the snoot to take the first picture of my project 365 (photo a day) which can be seen on flickr.