I spent a bit of time this morning looking for softboxes for speedlights and I’m flat out amazed at how much people are willing to spend on these things. There’s really not much at all to a softbox… a lightweight shell with a reflective surface and a diffuser of some sort to soften the light. The materials themselves are hardly expensive, and the engineering can’t be the justification either. Even for the budget-minded products, my guess is that it’s simply a case of charging what the market will bear.
I’ve had the idea before of putting a diffuser over a reflective umbrella. Really, all it’d take is a piece of ripstop nylon, some grommets, maybe a length of bungee to cinch things up… I’ve just never taken the time to do it. And since I’m a little behind the eight ball (does this surprise you?), I ordered an SL-5000 today from B&H so that I can have it in time for a shoot next weekend. Not having a working sewing machine, nor time to do the R&D, the $60 price tag seemed about as good as I was going to get for something larger than the 20″ $40 specials on eBay. Plus, with an actual product in front of me, I figure it’ll be easy enough to reverse engineer the diffusion panel to make my own down the road and save a few bucks.
I’m expecting I’ll need to figure out a mount for the speedlight, but that won’t be a problem. I’ve seen a few methods in my searching this morning, and I’m a resourceful enough guy that I’m sure I can come up with an elegant solution.
Stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted.