Sea snail macro with world’s cheapest ring flash – P365 Nov19

This is one of the snails we collected when we went down to Brighton Beach the weekend before last.

And this is the setup I used to capture the shot, with the world’s cheapest, lightest, easiest to make ring flash.

Being so close to the glass, the flash was casting a shadow of the lens on the snail. Having used paper stuck to the glass of the tank as a diffuser before, I had an idea to do the same here, but cut a hole in the paper the size of the lens. That way I could light the paper with the flash, diffuse the light around the lens, and get better light coverage from that close. There was enough of a gap that the glass was reflecting some light back into the lens, so I just snipped off the bottom of the sheet and lay it across the top of the lens.

Technical details:

Canon 350D on tripod.
Tamron 24-135mm @ 135mm with 75mm of extension.
Canon 580EX flash, set 10 1/2 power, 105mm zoom, triggered by Cactus V2 remote.
1/80th sec, f11, ISO200

Setup shot taken with ancient Canon Powershot A200.