Gel Mod for Quantaray MS-1 Slave Flash

I recently was given a couple of Quantaray MS-1 flash boosters. If you haven't seen them, they're basically simple, dirt-cheap, optically-triggered slaves. (See Steve's Digicams for a nice review of this item) Anyway, I wanted a simple way to add colored gel effects to these slaves without ruining the slaves in the process.

The colored gels were made by creating a PowerPoint presentation with blank slides filled with various solid colors and then having a local A/V presentation company create the slides for me. By making mounted slides out of them the gels are durable and easy to handle.

The clear plastic I chose was some left over Crystalite Polycarbonate (an acrylic similar to Plexiglas, but a bit stronger) from an unrelated project. It's 1/8th inch thick and comes in big inexpensive sheets at your local lumber superstore like Home Depot or Lowes. I could have used Lexan which is much more scratch resistant and about twice the price, but I didn't have any on hand.

This is the $19.95 Quantaray MS-1 slave flash. For twenty bucks it's nothing fancy: it trips on the first flash it sees, dumps a full flash output every time and is powered by two AAA batteries. (You can notice the battery hatch in the bottom left corner in this picture).



Here a piece of Crystalite Polycarbonate (better than Plexiglas, not as good as Lexan) has been cut to shape and the edges sanded for smoothness.



The clear plastic panel has been mounted to the unit with hot melt glue. Note the positioning: the plastic piece extends beyond the top of the slave flash unit by an amount equal to the width of the 35mm slide mount's top border.



Close-up detail of the hot melt glue used to attach the plastic.



A simple small binder clip, easily found in any office-supply store is used to clip a colored 35mm slide as a gel. Note that it exactly covers the flash's output window.



At twenty bucks a piece, why not make a couple of these? Here magenta and cyan gels have been placed.



Incidentally, I made the photo of the bottle of lidocaine at the top of this post by implementing Strobist's excellent $10 DIY Macro Studio setup as shown below. BTW, if you haven't been to the Strobist's site, make sure to stop by. It's absolutely packed with some of the best flash photography concepts and techniques you'll ever come across.



[Note: to avoid tripping these dumb slaves with your dSLR's pre-flash, make sure your main flash unit is in manual mode, not TTL. (In manual mode, most flashes—such as my Sigma EF-500 DG Super on my Digital Rebel—will not pre-flash.]