Photography Blog – Lighting

In dental photography the traditional lighting setup is a ring flash attached to the end of your lens. This is quite a large and cumbersome setup, however with this type of setup you can reliably get very good results.

Up until recently all of the larger camera manufacturers made their own OEM ring flash units, so for instance Canon and Nikon both had own badged units. However over the last couple of years Canon specifically has stopped producing it’s own ring flash units. This is not a huge problem but is quite interesting as it is an indication that technology is moving on and presents anyone using the Canon platform with some quite interesting options, which I will discuss below. Even if you do not use Canon equipment the following discussion should still be of interest.

OPTION-1: – Third party manufacturers are still producing ring flash units for use with Canon cameras. So it is still quite easy to put together the traditional setup. When buying one of these third part units always remember to make sure the unit is 100% compatible with your specific camera model, newer models may need the ring flash units from third party manufacturers to be firm wear upgraded, so watch for this.

OPTION-2:  – The other option would be to look at sourcing a used unit on eBay or something similar. If going this route make very sure that the unit is fully working; also look to only buy from an established seller with good. Feedback.

OPTION-3: – Now we move into interesting areas. Historically we use ring-flash units for dental photography as they were the best and easiest way to get the bright light needed to Macro photography. There are now some very interesting technologies that mean we can start looking at using constant light sources, these used to be far too large for general photography, however now very small and very bright light sources are becoming available. One of these that presents some very interesting opportunities to do things differently. One of them I would like to introduce you to here is called a Lumecube.

Lumecubes are very small rechargeable units that can be mounted using an arm onto a DSLR camera, these then are able to provide very bright constant light. I have experimented with these types of units recently and the results are really good. To find out more about Lumecube check outwww.lumecube.com