P365 Jul25: Projector/diffuser

Sorry it's been so long since an entry. It's been busy lately!! I'll try and catch up over the next couple of days.

Sometimes I get great ideas. Sometimes between idea and completion something goes wrong and great turns into not so great.< After using a dried flower arrangement so successfully to cast an interesting shadow for the backdrop of some portrait photos I took of some friends a month ago, I thought it would be cool to be able to project shadows of any kind of design anywhere I wanted. I came up with an idea of how to do that, and built it. The results, however, weren't nearly as good as I had hoped:

As you can see, the resulting shadows are very vague and soft, not at all like the shadows I achieved a month ago.

A bit of thinking over the results clears up the cause. It's all to do with the apparent size of the light source. Because the shadow casting object (a pattern photocopied onto acetate) is so close to the light source, the relatively small source size (about 5cm across) appears large. The larger the apparent light source size, the softer the shadows. The acetate sheet is only 15cm from the light, the dried flowers I had previously used were over 100cm away. As a result their shadows were much better defined.

At least I can replace the acetate with some tracing paper and use it as a small, compact softbox diffuser, so it's not a complete loss :)