Lighting a high school gym doesn't have to be expensive

Well it's bball season and so I thought I'd put up a post on how to make my cheapo gym strobe kit.  I use Vivitar 285's for my kit, they're inexpensive and powerful, but best of all they will work with a generic 6v lead acid rechargeable battery, no fancy electronics to fry.  I wouldn't hook up this battery to a canon or nikon flash for the simple reason I just don't know where the positive and negatives are in the battery compartment.  I buy the old version of the vivitar's, the new ones they sell at BHphoto have had issues.  I try not to pay more than $60.00.  Other options are sunpak flashes or some of the new chinese flashes discussed here on Strobist.  I have no experience with any flash other than the old Vivitars that I own, so I cannot recommend anything else.  How can you tell what 285 you have, old or new?  Look at the bottom of the flash, it will say made in china or made in japan if it's one of the original Vivitar's, the new ones don't say anything. I have two "china" and two "japan" units.

The Vivitars have a battery insert that makes a great template for the fake battery, I just cut out a wood block to fit the space and use screws to make the contacts.  The cable is lamp cord (18 gauge or 16 gauge) that you can buy by the foot at any hardware store. I actually have reels of this stuff for wiring up my arena strobes.

The other great thing about this insert or fake battery is that you cannot put it in the flash wrong.  It will only go in one way.  Check out this blog for another way to make the fake battery using the Vivitar battery insert.

The + and - signs are pretty self explanatory.  Just be sure you have the same thing on the other end, I end up marking one side with black marker to make sure I don't get the two confused at the battery end.

I found the connectors at Radio Shack, I think they are for RC cars.  You can also just use the slide on connectors directly to the battery like I have it in the first photo.   I like the black and red wires that the RC car connector uses, no chance of screwing up the polarity. 

The batteries can be found at BatteriesPlus or your neighborhood electronics store (think RC cars or other hobbyist electronics), any 6v Lead acid rechargeable will work, keep the amps at 4.5 to 5.   To charge them you can use a special wall wart charger like this....

This will set you back about $30.00 or you can go to your local auto parts store and pick up a motorcycle battery charger for around $20.00.

 

To see how this system works, check out the photos in this article.

For an article on how to light a high school gym with small flashes, someone grabbed the tutorial from Maxpreps website and put a .pdf on their website........here's the link

check out this blog

http://www.diyphotography.net/     I love this kind of stuff.
Here's another great DIY article on bouncing flash.

blog links

I've been going through and trying to fix all the broken links that came with changing the name of the blog. 

flash on the monopod

Folks I've been seeing a lot of well lit legs and torso's but everything above that is dark. I'm guessing it's because some of you have the flash so low you're not lighting very evenly and the fall off is someplace around the solar plexus. So adjust accordingly please.
Thanks

CALIBRATE YOUR MONITOR!!!!!!

Don't let good images look bad, know that your monitor is showing you the right exposures.
Here's an article on calibrating.

Joe McNally

So I'm reading this article in Digital Photo Pro about Joe McNally and his small lights lighting set-up and he mentions that he was having a problem getting enough light from his flash. Turns out he had -2 EV set on camera and didn't change it because he was shooting in manual and EV doesn't effect settings when you shoot in manual mode, BUT it will effect the flash when shooting in ttl! I thought that was very interesting and thought maybe some of you would too.

nifty lighting gadget and other interesting stuff....

Hanashiro had an article on SportsShooter about this and it looks very interesting...
http://lightwaredirect.com/index.html Thought I'd post it here for those of you who don't look at SportsShooter. There's also a great article by Doug Murdock on traveling with gear http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2259 I particularly was interested in the part where she disconnects the trunk lever by the drivers seat.