Ray Flash Review

The ringflash was originally invented for medical photography. Its shadowless light makes it ideally suited to creating warts 'n' all images of, er, warts. We'll come back to that later. It was quickly adopted by macrophotographers, because having a flash that surrounds the lens makes it almost perfect for close-up work. Then in the 1970s, some bright spark thought of using it on people and the soft, even light has been in and out of popularity ever since.

Traditionally, ringflash units fall into two camps; expensive, specialist and dedicated to a camera, or really expensive, specialist and too heavy to use outside the studio. The common words - 'expensive' and 'specialist' - meant that until recently the ringflash was the preserve of the professional. The Ray Flash puts paid to that elitism; it's an adaptor that fits in front of your flashgun and uses a series of internal plastic prisms that redistribute the light output from your flash to a ring around your lens. The unit just slips on the front of your flash and a little plastic lever clamps it in place - no need to modify your flash, and you only sacrifice a stop of power in the process.

Ringflash creates a unique image, especially on people. Unlike many lighting systems, ringflash produce great photos when the subject is close to the background, because the flash casts an even, soft, halo-like shadow behind the subject or subjects. The light hitting the subject itself is shadowless, yet strong and often gives a washed-out, slightly overexposed look to skintones. And then there's the distinctive white-ring catchlight in the eye. You have seen this before - think punk band photos, or Michael Jackson's Off The Wall album cover. It's not a particularly flattering light (it's the antithesis of the sort of well-modelled light of 1930s portrait photographers, for example) but if the subject has the looks and the personality to carry it off, it will look fantastic.

Alan Sircom

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