Making a DIY macro ringlight:

Have you ever wanted to try out some cool ringlight macro schots but you don't have the money for a ringlight. Well here is a quick tutorial for making a ringlight cheaply.

Contents:

1 - What you need
2 - Cutting and drilling
3 - Wiring
4 - Mounting

 

1 - What you need

Materials:

• LED's
• Some plywood/plastic sheet 3-5mm thick
• Resistors (see below for choosing the right ones)
• Insulated wire
• Battery connector and 4.5V battery pack
• Old/cheap/unwanted filter that screws onto the front of your camera
• Some thin plastic (maybe from some packaging)

Tools:

• Drill, ideally a drill-press for accuracy
• A protractor
• Coping saw/jigsaw
• Sandpaper
• Soldering iron + solder
• Hammer
• Your brain

2 - Cutting and drilling

First things first, you need to work out how to make the mounting board. You'll need to know how many LEDs you want (I used 20, but more might be better) and also your camera-subject distance.

Calculation 1:

To find the LED spacing, you need to divide 360 by the number of LEDs you have (so for me 360/20=18). This gives the angle in degrees (=a) between each LED.

Calculation 2:

In order to light up your subject, you'll need the LEDs to point at it. This means angling the LEDs slightly inwards. To find the LED angle you must first decide what radius circle you are going to put the LEDs on (=r). Using the distance to the object (=d), the calculation for the angle (=b) is b=arctan(r/d)

You should have decided the radius circle you want the LEDs on by now, so cut a circle of board (whatever you want - I used 5mm ply) slightly larger than this radius.

Once you have your circle, it's time to start drilling the holes (5mm for standard LEDs). Make sure they're all marked out carefully first, then either drill them by hand or set a drill press to the correct angle (as worked out) and drill away. I found a good method was to make a wedge at the correct angle and then to nail the circle to it through the center. You can then drill at the correct angle and move to each hole by simply rotating the wedge.

After drilling the holes there is one more step, you need to cut a circle out of the center of the board for the camera lens to fit through. This hole needs to be the same diameter as the old filter you have set aside. Cut this carefully with a coping saw/jigsaw/fretsaw.

3 - Wiring

First, more calculation, but this time there are plenty of calculators online to do the work for you! You need to work out the resistor value to use in your circuit. I use this calculator.

The calculator should give you an output of lots of resistors and LEDs in parallel. You'll need as many resistors as LEDs (most likely) but they're cheap so no problem there

When you have the LEDs and resistors, stick all the LEDs into their holes with the flat edge of the LED facing to the left (anti-clockwise). This flat side represents the negative side of the LED (cathode), if there is no flat, then look for the shorter lead since that's also the cathode. Now if both of those methods failed or were conflicting, you should look inside the LED where there will be two trapezium shape bits of metal - the larger one is the cathode.

With the polarity determined and the LEDs in the holes, fold the longer (anode, positive) leads of the LEDs towards the center of the circle. If possible bend them so each one touches the next. Solder all of these together.

Once these are soldered, make a ring of plastic with a diameter just smaller than the LED circle (maybe 1mm smaller). Place this over the soldered anodes so that the cathodes stick up outside it. Then fold all the cathodes to the center (over the top of the plastic ring). Cut the cathodes quite short (maybe 5-6mm) and solder a resistor onto each. Now fold each resistor to meet the next, like with the cathodes. Solder them together.

Now it's pretty much done, you just need to solder a wire to each of the terminals (the wire rings formed by folding) and connect a battery connector to the other end of the wires.

Diagram:

4 - Mounting

Now it's time to make the adapter to fit the ringlight to your camera. Take your filter (make sure it fits on the lens you want to use) and coat it in tape. Once this is done, lay it on a flat surface and hit it with a hammer to smash the glass. Hopefully the tape will prevent anything flying out, but BE CAREFUL. Also make sure you do not hit it hard enough to distort the netak surround.

Once you have smashed the glass, carefully remove the tape and extract any glass from the rim.

Finally take the rim and glue it to the middle of your ringlight. You can now screw the light onto the front of your lens.

Done!!

Example Pictures