My Homemade Grid Spot
Rickets the Dog. Photo by Will Parson.
To kill some time this week I made myself a grid spot from some black straws, Elmer’s glue, Velcro and a raisin bran box. I got the idea from Strobist but making one yourself is pretty straightforward. I ended up abandoning precise measurement and just bent the cardboard around my flash head. The straws were about 2.7 inches after I cut them into thirds. That made for a pretty narrow beam as you can see; longer straws I think wouldn’t be very useful unless you needed an extremely precise flash.
As you can see in this photo of Rickets the Dog, the effect of the grid spot is useful in small areas where you don’t want light bouncing around. My faithful subject was sitting in a narrow hallway, maybe four feet wide, with bright white walls.
In other news, let me know if you’d like to adopt a dog with two fried retinas.
