DIY Flourescent Area Light
Submitted by Sebastian on Fri, 04/19/2013 - 15:10
Photographed using 2 Diva Lites by gregorfischer.photography (flickr.com Creative Commons)
I love the Kinoflo Diva Lite - it provides soft but strong light and gives great texture to faces. Since I always have it at disposal and can use it whenever I want I took it for granted already. It was just in Geneva at the first global apertus° community meet up when I wanted to rent one for the apertus° booth that I discovered how incredibly expensive these are. So I started my research to find out what part of it is so costly and created this apertus° project to build an alternative cheaper DIY fluorescent area light and sharing everything learned on the path in the apertus° spirit.
So now we disassembled our Diva Lite to see what secrets hid under the hood - the big surprise: NONE - they also just use off-the-shelf Osram Ballast and no additional electronics - their tubes are of higher grade than standard ones but you can get alternative tubes for studio lighting that are maybe just 5-10% worse for a much lower price.
Details
and the AXIOM project is certified Open Hardware by
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2 Comments
DIY Flourescent Area Lights
I have been working on the same issue and have come up with a design that has worked for me in the past four months of testing. The design of the fixture is very simple and light weight. Light output is the same as the Kinoflo DIVA. I also designed a barndoor system but certainly not as elegant as the Kinoflo so I have yet to build it. In practice, clipping 24 x 10 inch black cards to the top and bottom of the fixtures seems to work well.
http://public.fotki.com/andybieb/my-first-album/481541-539685319388.html
Very nice!
Very nice!
Would you be willing to share more of your design/plans or photos of your assembly?
Regards Sebastian
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