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Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on strobist:

This Camera Flash Ditches The AAs For A Powerful 12-Volt Li-Ion Battery

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Here’s a neat take on the small pocket strobe or flash. Instead of forcing you to buy and manage the charging of a ton of AA batteries to use it, the Neewer TT850 is a hot-shoe strobe that uses a 12-volt li-ion battery. This not only makes charging easier, but also means you get a lot more pops per second thanks to the fact that the battery can dump 12V instead the flash instead of the paltry 6V that 4xAAs can manage.

RoundFlash — One Ring Flash To Beat Them All

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Ringflash: You love the harsh-yet-even light, and the donut-shaped highlights it throws into the subject’s eyes. You love that you can make magazine-style photos with a single, on camera flash. But you hate the bulky plastic adapter you have to carry around to make it all happen.

What you need, my creative-yet-lazy friend, is the RoundFlash. It’s a flash that’s round.

The Light Blaster Projects Slides Into Your Photos Using Your Own Flash And Lenses

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Just five short years ago I interviewed the magnificently-bearded Julius von Bismarck about his Image Fulgurator, a modified 35mm film SLR which would project an image onto whatever it was pointed at using a powerful flashgun. The gimmick was that the device was triggered by the flashes of innocent tourist sheep as they flocked to famous monuments and snapped point-and-shoot pictures.

Invisible to the human eye, Julius’s various pictures and messages would be marked indelibly onto the pixels of these tourist photos. The fact that the Fulgurator looked like a gun just made the whole thing cooler.

Now, there’s a version you can buy. It comes from the folks at DIY Photography, and it’s called the Light Blaster.

Spider Monkey Utility Belt Hooks Turn You Into A Photographic Batman [Review]

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There's some irony that the object now stuck to my Spider Monkey -- forever -- is a clock.
There's some irony that the object now stuck to my Spider Monkey -- forever -- is a clock.
Spider Monkey by Spider Holster
Category: Camera Gear
Works With: Anything
Price: $17

I was going to ditch the standard review format for this post and instead make a gallery of different objects hung on my belt Using the neat little Spider Monkey accessory holster.

That was until I discovered that the adhesive tab that helps hold the Monkey’s Tab onto the target accessory is not reusable. Well, that might not be strictly true. It might well be reusable, but I will never find out because it is almost certainly unremovable.

DIY iPhone LED Ring-Light For Under $10

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Just a few weeks back we brought you the then-cheap $100 ring-light for the iPhone, a cheap way to shoot flat fashion photos and videos with your favorite camera. Now, though, you can achieve the same thing for just $10.

Bonus: It’s a DIY project, so you have a great excuse to ignore your family this Christmas.

LED Ringlight For High-Fashion iPhoneography

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Ring flash — once the preserve of high-end (or deep-pocketed) fashion photographers and macro nerds with real, like, cameras — now in reach of us plebs with cameraphones. The LED Ringlight from Adorama is a dim-able, continuous light source that can now be used for video and non-synced camera lighting, and it costs just $100.

Why bother? Read on:

Use A Business Card To Add Color To Your iPhone’s Flash

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Here’s an incredibly neat little hack for making your iPhone’s flash suck less, and it’s marred only by the photo used to illustrate it, which features some kind of Android “phone.”

If you ever wondered how you might use colored gels on your iPhone’s flash, read on. Or just look at the picture — it’s pretty self explanatory (once you get over the inexplicable purchase of an Android handset anyway).

Old-Style Newspaperman Flash Gun For iPhone [Kickstarter]

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Flash!

 

It’s hard to overstate my love of the Paparazzo light, despite the fact that I have never touched or even seen one outside of the photos on its Kickstarter page. Maybe it's the idea I like so much: it's an old-style flashgun which pumps out a ridiculous 300 lumens of subject-petrifying light whilst making you look like and old-school newspaperman.

Widget Mounts Any Flash On Sony’s Customer-Hostile Accessory Shoe

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$80 to get a feature the usually comes for free

Sony has long had an inexplicable love affair with proprietary connectors, accessories, anything. From Memory Sticks to ATRAC Minidiscs to annoying headphone sockets on phones, Sony’s philosophy seems to be "if you can piss off a customer, why not do it?"

And so it is with the NEX mirrorless cameras. Excellent devices in almost every way, unless you want to use a flash, in which case you have to spring for one of Sony’s own specialty units. Still, this customer hatred is at least good news for third-party accessory makers, and NEX Proshop will now sell you an adapter that adds a proper hot-shoe and PC socket to your NEX camera.

DIY Grid Spot For All You Flash Photographers Out There

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This DIY grid spot looks as professional as a store bought one. Photo Jeff Vier (CC BY-SA 2.0)

On of the funnest* things you can do with off-camera flash is to modify the light. This might mean squirting it through a “snoot” (some kind of tube or cone which focuses the light into a tight beam), reflecting it from a colored, uh, reflector, or firing it through a giant soft-box.

Or you can use a grid spot, an excellent tool for pointing your light at one single spot, far away, with a sharp fall-off into shadows at the edges. Sound expensive? It can be, unless you steal some drinking straws from your local fast food emporium and follow along with this how-to.

Colorful Filters Can Resurrect Your Old Flash

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These fun filters are a great reason to charge some AAs and dig out that old abandoned flash
These fun filters are a great reason to charge some AAs and dig out that old abandoned flash

You have a camera, and maybe you have an old flashgun lying around the place. Problem: while you know what to do with the camera, even in all-manual mode, you are terrified of that flash. Used on top the camera it washes everything out and makes it look like a drunken birthday party photo taken in a bar. Used off the camera… well, in that direction there be dragons.

You really should learn to use off-camera flash. But seeing as you never will, Photojojo’s neat set of flash-filters will at least give that old strobe something to do.

ThinkTank’s Widget Wallets Will Help You Organize Almost Everything

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I’m a complete neat freak. Add to this my weakness for bags of all kinds and you’ll see immediately why I love these new organizing wallets from ThinkTank. These four wallets are designed for tidying and storing SD cards, flash gels and cameras batteries.

If you hear the phrase “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” and nod in solemn agreement, then read on.