DIY Ring Light

As you’ve probably noticed, we do a lot of closeup photos of things like flowers and electronic projects on this blog. Lighting is always a problem on those types of pictures. The “right” tool for the job is a ring light. That’s a specialized flash which supplies light from directly around the lens. But a good ring lights are expensive. So today Peter and I made one. We followed these instructions. The result looks like this:

I still need to add a diffuser, but it does a pretty good job without one. Here are some examples:

This is made out of these LED rings.

They’re designed for installing around the headlight of your car to make it look like one of those new cars with the LED running lights. They’re quite inexpensive. They’re just a circular PCB with a bunch of LEDs soldered to it. They come in several different diameters. You can get them here.

The pictures above were taken with a 9v power supply, but the lights are designed for 12 volts. I’ll probably switch it over to 12 to see if I get make it a bit brighter.