This weekend I made myself a beauty dish out of some metal bowls I picked up at the local department store. I was following a great tutorial I found on DIYPhotography.net, but my good friend Tyler helped me modify the design to make it a bit more flexible.

First we followed the tutorial as far as cutting the main hole in the back of the large bowl with some tin-snips. However, my crappy drill was having problems cutting the holes in the sides of the bowl, so I called up my friend Ty who’s got a workshop in his garage where he builds gun parts (yeah… he’s one of those guys), and he suggested I scrap the stiff all-thread rod idea and instead make a metal tri-pod and use rivets to attach the two bowls together.

So we took a trip to the hardware store and picked up a very thin flexible aluminum stip and cut it into equal lengths. Then he simply drilled a hole at each end of the aluminum strip, riveted them to the small bowl, bent them into the correct shape with the large bowl on my AlienBees unit, and marked the places for the large-bowl rivets. Then we took the bowl off the AlienBees unit, drilled the holes, and riveted the other end of the strips to the large bowl.

Well, then I was left with a rather dangerously ragged hole where the dish connects to the AlienBees unit. We didn’t want to use DuctTape or Electrical tape to cover that because it would melt under the heat of the light, so we took another trip to the home-improvement store to get aluminum tape, cut it into small strips, and wrapped it around the ragged-edged hole. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s not a hazard.

Then it’s ready to use!