This is a preview of my recent shoot with Jill Tracy. The full set will be up soon.
It wouldn’t be a real project without some last minute fabrication adventure. To create the lace projection, I started with a slide projector from the 1970s and some scraps of lace. Testing showed me that the projector was bright enough to use as a light source without a tripod. Since I didn’t know if I’d be able to easily find power on location, I planned on using the Vagabond Mini battery pack that goes with the Paul C. Buff Einstein strobes. Mike Estee looked at what I was planning to do and informed me there was no chance of those objects working together successfully.
There was a few hours left before the shoot, so we decided to solve this problem. Could we pull out the slide projector bulb and shove a flash head in there? What about a different lens to make the projection larger? What about starting from scratch, firing up Solid Works and designing a box to mount on the front of the flash head? Salvaging the lens mount from a busted Canon 20D, Mike and I worked together to design this thing. He headed over to Tech Shop and cut the pieces out of a sheet of acrylic. A few hours later, after some lasering and taping, we had a slide projector for a flash head.
As expected with version 1.0 of anything, it wasn’t perfect. Being made of acrylic, it gets really hot when the modeling light is on. Also, I learned why there’s a fan in the slide projector. Without any way of shielding slides from the heat, they melt after about fifteen seconds of the modeling light being on. Oops. Version 2 will be made of metal, will have a fan, and perhaps some IR glass to block out some of the heat.
It totally worked out for the shoot though. I just used the modeling light sparingly and focused quickly. There was a lot of guessing in composing shots, but it wasn’t the first time I worked with an unpredictable process.
Mike Estee wrote a great blog post about our Slide!Flash, v1.0. The files are included in case you want to make your own! Let us know if you do and if you make any improvements.
