This blog is devoted to the application of optical fibers in photography. I have several homemade (DIY) flash adapters channeling the light from the flash close to the lens. The technique can be used mainly for macro photography, but I will show examples for wide angle close focus techniques as well. The recent version is called fiberstrobe V3, hence the name of the blog is "fiberstrobe".

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Ringflash adapter for Sony NEX-5

For couple of weeks, I have a new toy, a sony nex-5 mirrorless camera. I like it a lot and I'm still very impressed with the resolution and the sensitivity of it's sensor. Of course I like the compactness of the body and the tiltable high resolution LCD screen, which makes the camera a perfect macro photography tool. But there are some problems. There is no dedicated macro lens (yet) for the nex and it has only a small detachable toy flash that is not even compatible with the wireless protocol of the sony alpha system. So it can't trigger my big flash in a wireless way. Nevertheless, I'm trying to get out the best from the camera. According to the rumors there are macro lenses on the way from both sony and sigma. Untill they arrive  I've also tried the 18-55mm kit zoom with a Marumi achromat lens and I  achieved nice close-ups close to 1:1. Although the flash is small I decided to give a try and built something with optical fibers to have a better illumination of the macro subjects. Here you can see the result. A ringflash adapter for sony nex-5:




 I'm quite happy with the results so far. At iso400 I managed to use f18 with correct exposure.
The alignment between the end of the fibers and the flash should be improved but I don't have really good idea yet.
I had time only to take some test shoot in the the house. I'm sorry for the boring orchid shoots, but this is my mostly used test subject:

 ISO400, f14

Iso400, f18

Iso400, f16

ISO400, f16

In my next post, I will give detailed "how to build" instructions

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