Ring light

Today I opened another Ebay purchase - a Ring Flash for a macro lens. I had always thought these specialised lights to be very expensive so when I was able to purchase one for $62 including postage I jumped at the chance! The camera with macro lens has been promised to me so I felt that this item would be invaluable as a companion to it.

Opening the package was a surprise, the quality of the goods looked to be robust and well constructed. There also seemed to be a lot of things in the box!
Taking out the ring light I found six different sized adapter rings to fit almost any sized macro lens.

The camera I was to fit this light onto is a Canon D40 and has a 58mm lens.

The adapter ring is flat, as you can see, with a raised ring screw that fits neatly inside the lens ridge. The ring flash then slips onto this ring.

The controls for the light fit onto the top of the camera in the hot shoe - but the connection is NOT a hot connection.

There are two inputs on the control, one is for the lead to the light (as shown) and the other is for a power connection that is also included - along with a conversion adapter for Australian power sockets.
I installed two Alkaline AA batteries and switched on . . . .

Don't ask me why I was surprised that it actually worked - but I was! Hence the photograph!
Next thing to do was to find a few things to try it out on so here are three examples.

I had printed this train timetable from a web site so the print is not brilliant - but is as was printed - the reason I chose a paper with type on it was to see how even the lighting was from the ring light (not a flash, it is on all the time the switch is in the "on" position).
Since I actually need this light to help a friend put together some good macro photos for a book he is writing I chose a rock as one of my subjects.

Now I could see yet another advantage to the ring lighting - hardly any shadows! I have not done any clever Photoshop work on any of these photos - just adjusted the levels and added a little sharpening.
Last photo needs no explanation but gives an idea of the distance I was from my subjects shown above.

This is a Twenty Cent piece 28mm diametre. The picture has not been cropped.
This light is going to be fun to use!
AJ