Kens Photography Blog

If you don’t know, barndoors are a set of 4 flaps on hinges that you can pull up in front of your flash heads to control your light with great presicion.

Some advantages of barndoors for studio lights:

• Allow you to block of light in any direction to control spill light.
• Allows you to focus the light by closing in the doors, any size of snoot can be emulated.
• Allows you to make strips of light either horizontially or vertially, great for controlling hair, shoulder, and background effects.
• Allows you to feather the light falling on your subject.

And last but perheps the best feature of barndoors..

If you have a studio lighting kit that isn’t 100% correct between the modelling and flash, just set the flash and modelling lights to match eachother 100% using a light meter, then control the light amount by closing or opening the doors. The barndoors controls both the modelling light and the flash output, because it’s in front of the reflector.

You can open all the way or close the light output completely with great presicion manually and just leave the flash and modelling dials alone where you know they are propertional.

Couple a set of barndoors on all your flash heads with a couple of large home made diffusion panels and that’s all the flash assesories you will ever need. Want a small softbox look? move the light a bot away from the diffusion panel and close in the barndoors. Want a huge softbox look? Move the light away from the diffusion panel and open the barndoors some more, any size softbox look can be created, and you don’t need to assemble the damn things. Move the lights close to the diffusion panes and you get a nice bright spot in the middle with a great looking feathered edge, open and close the doors to control where the feathered edge hits your subject.

You can emulate snoots, striplights and almost every lighting accesory with diffusion panels and barndoors with your studio lights.