DIY Grid Spot

Grids are light modifiers used to control the spread of light. Grids give a very tight spot of light depending on the thickness and the internal spaces of the corrugation material used. Let us try making a diy grid for speedlights.

Note that we are using PVC cealing material used for interior designing.

The advantages of using PVC Cealing material for making grids are.

• They are easy to obtain
• They are weather resistant
• The commonly available sizes are just perfect for a grid.
• Easy to work on

PVC cealing material is available in a variety of colors. We have chosen white plastic to minimize lose of light.

Supplies for Softbox Project

• PVC Cealing Material
• Black Recksin
• Velcro
• Adhesive

Tools Required for the Softbox Project

Steel Scale, Paper Cutter / Knife, Permanent Marker

The material we choose had a corrugation size of 8mm square. we cut the material to match the face of our flash unit. the one we made had a depth of 4 cm.

Here a piece of PVC cealing material left over from some interior modifications done at our place some time back.

The material had a corrugation size of 8mm.

For our vivitar flash unit we only needed to cut out 4 pieces. We chose to start with 4 cm deep grids and experiment with other sizes once we saw the results.

The pieces are all cut and we are now ready to assemble our grid.

We used tape to join all the pieces to one single grid unit.

Next we needed some mechanism to fix the grid spot to our flash unit. Using a piece of recksin and some Velcro we could easily fix the grid spot to our flash. The recksin was cut to size matching our flash head and Velcro was glued to the opposite ends. Now we could easily affix and remove the grid. The advantage of such an attachment is that if we make grids in other sizes (varying depth) we could attach them all using this.

This is how it looks once it is finished.

A test shot using our diy grid spot. The 4 cm depth of the grid seemed perfect to shoot relatively small objects like the flower shown; but if you need a bit more spread it will be better to make a 2 cm grid spot.

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