Luca Sartoni – Portfolio

I’m spending a couple of weeks in Ravenna, Italy, visiting my family and what better chance to catch up on some father-son time than with a DIY project? I was truly inspired by this Ring Light Tutorial that I found a few days ago so I gave it a try. Just to be clear, I was directing the project, but my father did all the work. He’s just amazing with this kind of stuff, I can only sit back and watch. So… cheers to him!

Let’s get started with a board of plywood. I wanted my ring to be kinda big, so my initial board was 60x75cm wide.

Always remember: “Measure twice, cut once”.

I wanted a 40cm wide hole, so we defined the center of it at 30cm from the top and 30cm from the side. Then we outlined a perfect circle with a radius of 20cm, originating from the previously defined center. We then outlined a 30cm circle originating from the same center to help round the corners of the board at the end.

We drilled a hole along the inner circle.

With a jigsaw we took out the inner circle, following the outline.

Once we had a nice round hole in the middle, we proceeded to round two corners of the board.

With the jigsaw we cut off the two upper corners following the outlines.

Then we gave a solid pass with sandpaper to smooth out all the cuts.

Then we drilled 16 holes along the border. Each hole is 30mm wide.

We then painted it with a nice layer of wood protector, in order to avoid staining the wood during the future use.

We then placed 16 lightbulb sockets and we wired them up together.

We also added a switch and a long power cord.

I then set up my Fuji X-T1 with my 56mm lens on a tripod and placed myself in front of it. The wifi remote capabilities of this camera are awesome for self portraits. Here an example:

And this is the final result, after editing: