Cheetah Rice Bowl RB-120 ring flash mod Take 1

What I'm trying to achieve is a giant ring-shaped light source like what you get from a de-focusing a Broncolor or Briese parabolic. It gives a different look than a softbox, more like a giant beauty dish. Through experimentation, I found that I cannot simply position a flash head inside my existing Cheetahstand RB-120 at various distances from the apex and get similar results, the box simply isn't close enough to a true parabola to have a focus point. In a nutshell, what I got was a big hard light source when I tried this, not light coming from around the rim of the dish like I was hoping.

Today's experiment was to see if I could force the light to the outer rim of the RB-120 by another means. I stitched together a replacement for the inner diffusion screen, which attaches the same way, but is black ripstop on the front and shiny silver on the back.

It works as a proof-of-concept piece, but it's not perfect. For one thing, Jo-ann Fabrics doesn't sell silvered ripstop nylon, so I had to make a 2-piece construction from black ripstop and "silver lamé" which is 64% aluminum. This lamé is horrible to work with, it snags and runs easily, is slippery and hard to sew, and is more translucent than ideal. Secondly, it's clear from this experiment that my disc is too large; it blocks light from directly reaching the outer 6" of the rice bowl.

Version 2.0 is going to need 2 significant changes: Smaller diameter screen with its own elastic cords (so that I don't overstretch the ones attached to the ricebowl), and it will be made of proper 70D mirror-laminated black ripstop like the ricebowl itself (had to mail order this stuff at $20/yd).

Here's what version 1.0 looks like, and with the Rovelight 600b at full power, I can shoot f/13 @ ISO 100 at 2m subject distance:

Selfie facing the light, and 1:1 of the catchlights (which have breaks at the bottom from my outstretched arms holding the camera)

almost like a ringflash effect

How about some form of hear reflective material? It might thicker and as reflective, thus giving you a more black in the middle of the "ring".

TeamSpeed wrote in post #17884013
How about some form of hear reflective material? It might thicker and as reflective, thus giving you a more black in the middle of the "ring".

That could work too. I have not examined these materials to see how opaque they are. Right now, I'm waiting for my "mirrored" ripstop to show up, which I ordered from a fabric store in Texas (ahh.biz). It's the same material as the softbox itself, a black nylon with a mirror-like silver finish on one side. Because it's made for photography reflectors, I expect it to be better suited for this than the lamé of my prototype, which was silvery, but just too translucent.

Kudos for the idea. Thats cool

What about just using an appropriately sized reflector with the silver side in and the black side out?