Hey kids! Did Santa bring you a speedlite for Christmas? Maybe it was a LumoPro or something similar that doesn’t come with its own pouch? Well, don’t let your new flash go unprotected out there. Just swipe some leftover bubblewrap and your trusty roll of two-inch gaffer tape and make your own ghetto-luxe padded pouch!

What you’ll need?

1. 2″ gaffer tape
2. Bubble wrap
3. Your speedlite

 

Cut strips of bubblewrap. You can be a stickler and measure, or just keep your flash handy and eyeball it. You’ll want the front panel to be longer on the bottom (for the bottom of the pouch) and back panel to be longer on the top (for the flap.) Keep the smooth side of the bubblewrap on top since that will be the inside of the pouch. The tricky part is that last bit when you’re taping inside the pouch.

 

I made sure to keep the flash inside the bubblewrap womb to make sure I was never making it too tight. You can test the ingress/egress (sexy!) of the flash as you go along. From there it’s just a matter of taping it up as neatly or as gritty as you want. The beauty of gaffer tape is its “scultpability.” To help around the corners, take a square of gaff and rip it halfway, then make a corner from that. Again, you can be as tidy and exact as you wanna be. I’m from tha streetz, so I like mine a little rough. (Or, I’m just lazy.)

One other tip: If you’re testing your pouch to make sure it’s not too tight, make sure to test inserting the flash both ways as you go along. (Oh, behave!) The flash probably has a chubbier end so it might fit one way, but not the way you want it to.

For the top flap, if you have some adhesive Velcro ™ laying around, great! If not, you can make a strap by folding a piece of gaff in half, tape it on, and just slide the tongue of the flap in that. (Rowr!) Gaffer tape has some friction to it, so this works fine for me. (See first picture on top)

There you have it:  A quick and dirty padded pouch for your speedlite.  It doesn’t feel half bad next to my factory pouches. If you try this, or have better ideas, let me know. And if you dug this, Like us on Facebook!

 

I have a fetish for Canonet cameras, something I know is not unheard of among camera junkies. But, my affection extends past the rangerfinder itself to the accessory flash that came with it in the nineteen seventies: The Canolite D. It’s so pleasantly sized, takes two AA batteries, and throws out some much-needed light. I like using it on other cameras too, like the Sprocket Rocket.

Last year, I acquired a Canolite D through some shrewd dealing. But, it seemed the joke was on me, as it didn’t really work. With a little investigation, I discovered some gruesome corrosion in the battery compartment. So, I took the instructions over at The Camera Archive to heart and got out the vinegar and the q-tips. (I omitted gloves, because I’m a real badass!) I spent a couple hours getting rid of corrosion. Success! I had a working Canolite!

But, earlier this year when I whipped it out from my sparse gear on the Oregon-Montana trip, it failed, I thought it was batteries but I replaced ‘em and still nothing. I figured maybe it was getting to be like me: just old and done. Luckily, Scott hooked me up with a classic Minolta that served ably. I threw the Canolite in my suitcase and forgot about it for a few months. Until tonight when I was cleaning out my gear and found it in a bag. So, I sat down to have a look and sure enough, the corrosion had crept back in! Fiends! This time, instead of vinegar I just scraped it with a big knife. Hell yeah!

Anyway the moral of the story is that corrosion comes back pretty quickly if unchecked. And, I have a working Canolite again!

(One of my fave Canolite-lit shots)

I ordered a kit to build a sound trigger with variable delay from HiViz.com. It comes as a bag filled with loose electronic capacitors, resistors, and wires. Fun! But, I fired up the detailed instructions and got after it.

The instructions are very clear. But, the kit assumes you have an extra PC sync cord to cut up in order to connect it to your flash. I didn’t feel like snipping a ten dollar connector. Luckily, the LumoPro flash I have has a 1/8-inch miniphone jack. So I cut up one of the two hundred pairs of cheapo earbuds I have, just to get the plug. I wired it up and it didn’t work. So, I did some reading and discovered that stereo plugs never work well.

I’d always wanted an excuse to go to Electronic City and browse the aisles of geek heaven. A mono miniplug was a buck sixty. I also picked up a black plastic project box.

An hour later I was covered in black plastic shavings as I used a Dremel to cut a perfect hole in the black case that holds the piezoelectric listening device. But, the whole thing fits pretty well.

And, as you can almost see from the video, it works.

I will need to continue to tweak it. It triggers the flash on every sharp noise, so if I use it on a dropped item, the flash will fire on the drop, and every bounce. That probably won’t work — but there are ways in the electronics to mitigate that. But, the basic device is operational.

Stay tuned for more.