flash accessories

I stumbled on this site whilst looking for something else, I thought it might be of interest to some of you

link

Much more professional looking than my cornflake-packet-and-duct-tape flash accessories, but they do the same job in the end. The gels could be useful though; I've been using sweet wrappers up until now (tins of Quality Street are back in the shops!) but they don't really balance properly with artificial lights so I only use them for special effects...

They dont balance properly because they are sub-contracted to both Lomo and Seagull. Seriously, though, I thought the prices were pretty reasonable and given the amount of unlightened folk around here who have shoe mounted 'guns, I think they would be quite useful

I concur! A lot of people don't like the DIY route and if I were a pro then I'd probably buy something like these just to stop my customers giving my cardboard contraptions funny looks...

I'm used to funny cardboard contraptions.

My first job was in a wedding studio, the guy was a brilliant wedding photographer, but the archetypal parsimonious Scot. He had won 'Kodak Bride of the Year and 'Ilford Photographer of the Year' several times and we were sponsored by Mamiya. Not one penny had to be spent on kit but not one penny was spent if it could be avoided. If lens hoods could have come off they were stuck on with Araldite, if there was any chance that you could put the flash sync lead into the wrong socket then the 'wrong' one was filled with Araldite. We went around with brand new Mamiya 645s and 67s that looked like they'd been dropped in a bucket of glue.

We went through a phase when every roll of film we processed was getting progressively over-developed. The cause: rather than spend money on proper timers, the boss decided to tape record himself counting out the processing so, "put film in developer... 5,4,3,2,1, remove film... put film in blix..." and so on. As the batteries in the cassette recorder depleted the developing time lengthened!

We were opposite the government offices where the Passport Office and the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board were, so there was a lot of passing trade from there. Passport photo technique: take one of the many broken and araldited-back-together Mamiya C330f Professionals, knowing what was wrong with each one, and slap a piece of cut film in the back. Take photograph. Develop, for speed ignore stop bath, take still wet film and stick it into the neg carrier of very, very expensive Durst enlarger kept for this purpose. Make prints. The trashing of the enlarger saved buying a Polaroid passport camera I think.

Really made me laugh, thanks for that

Me too!

I'm cheap but I don't think I'm quite in that league!

Coking used to make a set of creative filters (might still). but they come up on ebay cheap enough and quite often, it consisted of a large quantity of various coloured gel? type squares with holder, they were thin enough to cut with scissors and would be thin enough to bend over the head of a flashgun, probably be more consistent than sweet wrappers though not as nice to get hold of .