Making Your Own Ring Light

When my daughter, who has her own blog about makeup and fashion, told me that she wanted a ring light, I checked into it.  What is a ring light anyway?  Turned out that to get the best picture for the face of a model (see below), a ring light is placed in front of a camera to provide a uniform illumination.  It also causes a ring relection in the model's eye further creating the "cool" look.

Typically, a ring light cost a few hundred dollars.  Being a person who like to come up with alternative inexpensive solutions, I thought about building my own ring light.  I remembered that in the electronics lab, we have bench lights with a magnifying glass in the middle and a ring florescent light for illumination.  So, off to the local Lowes store I went.

Turned out that there are existing rather inexpensive light fixtures that one can buy for around $30 that uses the circular florescent bulbs.  The one I chose to use is the 14" Low Profile Round overhead fixture made by Lithonia Lighting.

When I opened up the box, I found all the pieces I needed (and some extras things that I might end up using for other projects).The key pieces I needed are the 12" circular floresent bulb, the bulb holder and the florescent bulb power supply.

The bulb holder is not open in the middle.  As a matter of fact, the power supply is attached to the middle of the buld holder plate (see below left).  So, the first thing is to remove the power supply and get the plate marked and ready to have the center removed (see below right).  The idea is to remove enough of the plate so that the camera can peek through the center but leave enough material to leave the holder clips for the 12" bulb intact.

I used a pair of sheet metal shear to remove the center of the bulb holder.  It took a little effort but can be easily done if you take your time and remove small pieces of the sheet metal at a time.  Below is the result of the cut.  For convenience, I removed the clips before the cutting.

After preparing bulb holder plate, I drilled some extra holes to mount the power supply to the one side of the holder and to secure the wiring.

I used an L-bracket to attach to the holder to provide a means of attaching the ring light assembly to a tripod.  To provide a stable way to attach the L-bracket and the power supply, a stack of washers were used as spacers to provide seperation between the different assemblies.

Below is a view of the finished ring from the rear and a picture of the finished ring light from the front.  More work can be done to secure the wires and to provide a more finished look.  I will get to that later.

For more results of how a model looks like when illumintated by a ring light be sure to check out my daughter's blog at:  http://modeyourlife.blogspot.com/.

She is a talented make up and design artist.  You might learn something from the artistic side of things after looking at all these techy stuff.  Enjoy!

Fruit Tree Grafting 2013 - Apple scion to a Pear tree

In my earlier Fruit Tree Grafting 2009 round 1 post, I talked about cross grafting between apple and pear trees.  Although the weather was great in 2009 and all the normal grafts were sucessful, none of the cross grafts took.
This year I tried grafting a Golden Delicious scion to my pear tree.  I did that in the March time frame while everything is still quite dormant.  This is how the graft looks like on 4/27 when the weather started to turn warm and the pear tree blossoms started to develop.

By 5/5, the Golden Delicious scion started to spout along with the rest of the pear tree.

And then, by early July, the leaves are out and the cross grafting of an apple scion to the pear tree was finally sucessful!!!

This graft was done with a single slant splice tied with the normal green grafting tape. I actually removed the grafting tape a couple of weeks ago to inspect the joint and all looked well.  I put the tape back on in case the growth is still not strong enough.  I will remove the tape by late summer or early fall.

Simple Seed Holder

It’s autumn, and you have harvested all the fruits and vegetables.  If you are into starting you own plants in the spring, you will want to keep some of the seeds from the fall harvest.

I have started to do some of that and was looking for a way to store the seeds.  I didn’t want to put the seeds in a plastic sandwich bag since some of the seeds were still kind of fresh and moist. I wanted to package them so that they could dry up and keep till next spring. I needed to label the packages so I could tell what was what. I have different types of peppers, tomatoes and melons.  It would be good to differentiate between the hot peppers that I grow less of to the different colored bell peppers.

Rice Filled Sock - your personal warmer

Remember those rubber hot water bottles that you might have used for soothing that cramped muscle or to warm up the bed on a cold winter’s night? Maybe you are too young to have that experience.  My daughter made a rice filled sock that does a much better job than the old water bottle.  She learned it from her friend .  The sock can be painted with a Sharpie pen and can be made into a very attractive companion (see above picture).

Look for an old sock and fill it with rice.  You can use any old sock that is still in good shape (no holes).  It can be any type of sock.  This a good opportunity to use up the pile of socks that you have been keeping while you were hoping that its companion would show up some day. : )   Of course you can also use a pair of socks to make a “twin” set of warmers.

Overall Grafting 2009 was a Success

It’s been a while since I did all those grafts in spring of 2009.  It is now Fall of 2010.  The scions that took had a full two seasons to grow.  Most of the scions took except for the experimental grafts.

The ones that failed were the cross genus grafts between the apples and pears.  Although I had one success before grafting an apple scion to a pear tree, I was not able to repeat that.  Also, except for the branch shown above, all the cherry grafts did not take.  While not having more cherry grafts take is a disappointment, it was not a big surprise.   Most of the branches I got from my friend Dave were mature branches.  Most of them had

One Simple Way to Conserve Water

Generally, it is advicable to run the tap a little bit before drinking the water off a tap, especially if the tap had not been used overnight.  Also, one might just want to run the water till it is cold for drinking or warm for washing hands.  Lots of water can be wasted.  Why not collect the water to use for other purposes in the house.  The water can be used for washing dishes or watering plants.

One easy way to do it is to wash and save a gallon milk or cider jug.  Keep the jug near a faucet so that water can be collected instead of letting it go down the drain.  In our house we collect about a gallon of water every few days.  This is just about enough to water the potted plants inside the house.

Fruit Tree Grafting 2009 Round 2

My friend Dave got me some fresh cherry branches from his sister’s cherry trees a couple of weeks ago.  When I got the branches, the temperature started to climb into the 50s and even 60s.  I was getting worried and wanted to get the branches grafted as soon as I can.  I did not want to repeat what happened last year where the leaves all came out suddenly and ruin my grafting opportunity.  We had a rainy Saturday but Sunday turned out to be great so I went out and did as many grafts as I can.