The Samo Frankenfuser MKI

Near-perfect: The Samo Frankenfuser Mk I yielded this shot of a house fly

Trial run: A shot of my OLFA craft blade. The flash is not harsh and captured some details on the steel and its finish

The ugliest diffuser snoot known to mankind: Samo Frankenfuser

There are many thing that you can't learn through reading books.Close-up photography is one of the aspects and recently, I learned that with high
magnification, the only way to get a good exposure, is with a flash gun at full flash setting.With a working focal distance of 5 inches from your lens, you would need a proper diffuser
and much to my amazement, most of the diffusers that I came across during a macro
workshop in Taman Rimba Kiara.The homemade diffusers are interesting enough to get me started on my own project. I used some scrap corrugated plastic to built a housing and lined the diffuser end with
aluminium foil to maximise light transmission.For the business end, I used a sheet of translucent bio-degradable plastic bag and taped it
onto the external lid of the diffuser.My mentor Master Kurt G called it a diffuser snoot.And it took me about 30-minutes to construct my first Samo 'Frankenfuser mk I' snoot and I
tried it out with success.I might need to rework the deflection angle of the snoot to get an even exposure.When I tried it out this morning, I noticed that the flash exposure from my Canon 430EXII
flashgun was not consitant.This may be a result from an accidental drop to the ground two months ago.The shock may have affected the flashgun's exposure sensors.I used it up close with a 1:1 magnification ratio on a jumping spider and the results were
three stops under.Now, what I did was increase the ISO sensitivity to 400 and managed to get an even
exposure.Even the flash exposure compensation did not work.So, I switched to manual 1/1 full power and managed to cap off a shot. The exposure was even and I guess with the results, I may have to send in my flashgun for
repair.As it is, there's much work to improve the Samo Frankenfuser and hopefully, a better and improved version would be out by this weekend.