Pina Savarin – How to build a cheap DIY reflective ring flash

Serves: 1
Preparation time: 4-6 hours
Cost: £1.99 *

* It cost me £1.99 as my mother-in-law gave me an old mould that her mother Pina used, (RIP Nonna Pina, we miss you). The other ingredients were lying around; apart form the diffuser which I bought on eBay from Hong Kong for £1.99 inc. postage!

Ingredients:

1 Aluminium Savarin cake mould
1 sheet Aluminium foil
1 can of glue
1 Flash gun diffuser for the Flash gun you are using.
1 Metal file
1 heavy duty knife or metal snips
1 piece of white diffusing material
1 Roll of gaffer tape

Plus
1 Off camera cord – though required for use this isn’t for building the reflective ring flash.

Recipe:
Take the Savarin dish and make sure that the hole in the middle is large enough to fit your preferred lens through. You can see there is a lip in the centre of my mould, image 1; this was filed off later to give a flat profile and a larger diameter for my 77mm lens. The aluminium mould, in my opinion, is the best as the metal is easier to work with and the end product is light and filling (geddit!).


Use the end of the diffuser to make a cutting template for the hole in the mould; this can be done roughly as the aluminium is quite workable. Please make sure that the flash gun is facing the right way when you do this as my 580exii has a little lip on top and the flash gun diffuser is not rectangular. Cut the aluminium with a view to bending the superfluous metal into ‘tabs’ that sit either side and underneath the flash gun diffuser, see image 2. Take the flash gun diffuser and work out how far the flash pushes into it, then cut it so that the flash gun sits about flush with the mould… my theory here is that we don’t want to waste any power from the flash gun, so the closer to the reflective surface of the mould the better… bear in mind you will need to allow for the curve of the mould. If you don’t feel confident with your estimation, poke the diffuser through the hole in the mould and gradually trim off the plastic, but keep putting the flash gun into the diffuser to make sure your workings are right. Depending on how generous you have been with the flash diffuser hole, you may need to fill the gaps with glue, see image 2 again. I’d like to thank my dad at this stage as my kitchen wasn’t equipped enough to handle this part of the recipe, Mr M, you are a genius!


As previously mentioned, file off the lip on the centre of the mould to give your mould a flat profile face and increase the internal diameter for larger lenses, see image 3. If your lens fits through and you are using material as a ring flash diffuser you could skip this bit.

Tear a piece of Aluminium foil and cut it into strips. I then cut these into long triangles to allow for covering the internal to external lip of the dish, though I got bored and covered in glue… creases are OK as it then looks sparkly when the flash fires. See image 5 for how rubbish mine looks.

Once you have the aluminium glued in; its front diffuser time! This will obviously depend upon your chosen material. I toyed with the idea of a thin white chopping board, A4 white paper, translucent film, breakfast cereal packaging (yep, the bag the cereal comes in) and a piece of material from an old light tent. I opted for the latter.

Whatever the material, this is just a case of offering up the dish, marking out the internal and external diameter, then cutting it allowing some ‘tabs’ of material for securing it to the outside and inside of the mould. I used a really unscientific method of roughly taping it in place, then using gaffer tape to secure the outside, the inside should be glued as there is no permanent way of securing the fabric to the outside of the inside diameter of the mould… if you know what I mean. Using fabric will also ‘protect’ your lens from the aluminium… see image 4 and 5.


Image 6 and 7 show the ‘end product’ covered in gaffer tape and attached to my Speedlite and the poor fitting of my front diffuser material, both of these points were down to my impatience and lack of workshop facilities…

The end result is an extremely light, powerful flash that gives that ‘halo’ shadow effect around the extremities of the subject… the only downside is having to hold the Speedite in one hand and the camera in the other… my next job is to make a quick bracket to connect the off-camera cord thread to the tripod thread on the base of my camera… should be a piece of cake (geddit!).