After reading through Maciek Lesniak’s Flickr stream I found it to be overflowing with helpful diagrams and setup shots.  You see, if you are a photo geek like myself, you enjoy the setup shot almost as much as the shot itself.  It is great seeing what someone came up with, how they positioned their equipment, and what settings they used to produce the final image. In several setup shots I saw a DIY beauty dish for Nikon Speedlights and became intrigued, which led to a trip to the store, and obviously to this post.

Let me preface this with a few things first.  I realize this is not my idea and that I am not breaking new ground here.  I know that there are commercially available kits available.  But sometimes these little projects are really fun to work on.  Second, use this as a guideline.  You will see in a few steps below just how much I screwed up.  Your results could come out looking much better.  But rather than clean them up and start over, I figured I would offer a real world example. Lastly, I am not a DIY guy by nature.  Normally, I would rather just buy the stuff.  But this seemed interesting so I thought I would give it a try.  It took me a few days, mainly because I would leave the dish to dry and forget about it or get busy.  Despite reading claims from other photographers that the project took them 30 minutes or an hour, it might take longer than that for you considering the paint has to dry.

The general guide I followed was the one written by Tom at Light and Pixels.  I made only two stops when picking up supplies and that was at Wal-Mart and Lowes.  I opted to get a Tupperware bowl rather than something different mainly because I did not want to go through the hassle of mounting an L-bracket and purchasing the extra hardware.  My thought was that if the dish were not too heavy, a strap would support mounting it to the Speedlight.

Here is what I bought:

I bought a few cans (few too many) of spray paint.  I had initially thought about using yellow to make the dish look a little Alien Beeish but opted not to go that route by the time I was through.  You can get away with buying 1 can of white and 1 can of black.  Depending on the bowl, a can of primer couldn’t hurt. I also got the gutter downspout connector, wall kick plate, mirror, velcro straps, bolts, and sealer.  I believe the total price was somewhere around $30.

The first task was to drill holes into the kick plate for the mounting screws and then attach the mirror to the underside of the kick plate.

For the connection to the Speedlight, I cut two small slots on each side of the gutter downspout connector.  I used the Velcro cable straps on each side which let me place the Speedlight in and strap it in place.

Now here is where you don’t want to follow me step by step, per se.  I decided to paint the bowl interior and then cut/attach the gutter downspout connector.  Hindsight being 20/20, I should have cut everything, attached the downspout connecter, then painted.

Also, I had the bright idea to use a razor to cut out the plastic.  Even without putting a lot of pressure on the bowl base, it was still too much causing it to crack.  Which also caused the paint to chip.  Which also caused me to want to throw something in the garage. But hey, sometimes you just have to screw up and learn a lesson.

Thankfully the bowl did not crack too terribly bad.  I was not ready to go out and buy something different, let’s put it that way.  Still frustrated, and with the gentle touch of the morning dew against a baby deer’s nose, I drilled three holes into the base to allow for the kick plate and mirror to be mounted inside of the bowl.

So next, I painted the black exterior and also tried to patch up some of the cracked plastic with the sealant I had purchased.

I have set this up so that the mirror/mount obviously stays in place, but I am still able to adjust the height off the bowl interior if needed.
With everything in place, here is the result:

And here are a couple of shots taken of me using the dish:

I wish I had bought a bigger bowl, painted the outside with another round of black (which I still plan on doing), and wished I had painted it a little better (more precise) than what I did.  But, it is what it is now.  I took some test shots but was not pleased with how they came out, mainly because they were rushed.  I need to take the time to do a proper setup with the right amount of space to see if this was really worth the hassle.

If you don’t like what I have written up, here are some other DIY beauty dish examples you can read up on. All of them seem to have had a much more fluid time at creating this thing than I did!

• Isaac Lane Koval
• Jon C. Haverstick
• Light & Pixels
• Knick Knack
• VOX
• Digital Grin Forum
• David Tejada