Finished Grid Snoot

It’s time for a bit of DIY again, this time a nice little grid snoot or two.

I have seen a few tutorials out there in web land detailing how to make these, I have taken the best of each and added my own touches to streamline the process considerably. This method is FAST, no messy glued up fingers, and the grid looks really neat. This version is also immune to the problem of straws falling out caused by the straws becoming unstuck from the brittle dried glue.

Why do you need a grid snoot? Well for one thing they can be VERY much shorter than a normal snoot, to give you an idea how well these restrict the light beam I shot my flash through a bundle of 203mm x 4.3mm straws and from about 15′ away (5m) the spot was about 6 or 8 inches across! Another advantage of grids is that no matter what the shape of your flash head, the spot light is circular.

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There are times when there is just not enough light to take the picture you want so you have to get some from somewhere, most of us photographer types tend to use a thing called a flash gun! The trouble is flash guns sometimes produce too much of the stuff and throw it all over the place and this is where a nifty little tool like a snoot comes in handy.

A snoot is basically just a tube which you stick on the end of your flash head which blocks light from the sides and leaves you with a tight beam which can be positioned pretty much wherever you want.

PA Katana MD

This shot was taken using a snoot and shows the effect (or one of them) you get by using one. This rather superb model aircraft was sat on my living room floor just in front of my couch and did not make for a very interesting photo when lit normally with an un snooted flash because having a couch sat behind it was just plain awful!

So instead of just sticking a flash somewhere and shooting it, I put a home made snoot on it and positioned the flash to just light up the front of the plane. The results being a more dramatic looking photo and the horrible cream coloured couch background lost in the darkness.

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