Shooting in dark abandoned buildings or at night can pose some problems. My 1D Mark II lacks a focus assist light and while my Rebel XTi has one, it’s a terribly annoying seizure causing strobe. Sometimes I might have a flash on the shoe and can use its assist beam but that isn’t always practical and it doesn’t help me to see what I’m shooting if the light levels are really low.
A little while ago I found that using a spare headlamp made for a very handy focusing assist light. The problem with that was mounting it was a bit fiddly and it’s not always very secure. I knew then that I wanted to come up with something more robust, flexible and ultimately more useful.
Thankfully I managed to find the bits and spare parts I needed to attach a small but potent flashlight to the tripod mounting brackets already on my cameras. The resulting contraption gives me an aimable flashlight with a built in spot-to-flood focusing system and is completely modular and easily allows for components to be swapped.
The rig uses an Arca-Swiss compatible clamp, a small Giottos ballhead, Romisen RC-29 II Q3 LED flashlight (from ShiningBeam.com) and a few bits of hardware. Time will tell how it fares in use, I will hopefully have the opportunity to try it out soon. More pictures of the focus assist light are below.
The other project that is ongoing is the considerably more complicated ring light which I am working on. Right now it isn’t moving anywhere particularly quickly, I still have some planning to do and I need to see if I can find some scrap material. In due time it too shall come together, but at this point I have no idea how long that’s going to take!
