Creating barn doors on a work light. Any advice on improvements?
 

Hi guys! I just finished up two different versions of barn doors that fit on work lights. One is not that difficult to do but the other is much harder. Can you guys take a look at the photos and tell me if you see any room for improvement. I will post the links to the photos below:

version 01
http://markapsolon.com/videophotopics/DSC00258SM.jpg
http://markapsolon.com/videophotopics/DSC00259SM.jpg



version 02
http://markapsolon.com/videophotopics/DSC00321A.jpg
http://markapsolon.com/videophotopics/DSC00323A.jpg

The first version is before I used high heat paint so just keep that in mind. I am going to be doing video tutorials on both barn doors within the next few weeks

I think i like version one. it looks easier to make.

Mark,
It looks as if version 2 would be leaking light around where the hinge attaches to the barn door. I'm not sure what the advantage of version 2 is.
Ken

I started out with these worklights and quickly learned why barndoors are so useful. In this forum I found a post where someone just bought barndoors and drilled 4 holes and that was it. So I did exactly that. Very cheap solution as well.

That being said, although these worklights are very economical, they soon become a limitation. Their shape produced odd double shadows. The stands are not very sturdy and not that tall and have limited tilt adjustments. Its hard to adapt them to be used with normal light stands. The light is not 3200K (more like 2800K) so they don't mix well with pro lights and always require a custom light balance. The light thrown is not distributed evenly. And there is some work to do to get barndoors on them!

My point of this response is to help my fellow DVI'ers to not to fall in love with these worklights and keep in mind that they have some limitations. I quickly learned that the quality of lighting had a major impact on the quality of my video, and as I got better with the videocamera I eventually outgrew the worklights and had to take the plunge for better lights.

Oh by the way, I started getting much better results after I learned to put 216 diffusion gels over these lights.

Version one is very similar to what I did a couple of years ago. My differences were: 1) I used small piano hinges so the entire length of the barn door was attached to the fixture. 2) Before attaching the barn doors to the fixture I first made a filter slot from aluminium channel then attached the barn doors to it.
Lastly, I wadded up a sheet of aluminum foil. When pressed out flat again the foil contained a lot of wrinkles. When I fitted the foil to the reflector pan of the work light I not only got a more even spread of light, but picked almost one more stop of output.