Creating A Perfect Circle Of Light

Torchlight can be great when taking photos at night, it’s good to fun to play around with, illuminating different areas, or even just using a direct full beam of light in the fog, which allows it to hang in the air, and show the full path of light.

I’ve got an old torch that projects a square when fully zoomed, and I’ve taken a few photos with this, enjoying the contrast a full diamond of bright light brings to the scene.

My current torch can be zoomed to project a circle of light at it’s narrowest focus. I took a few photos with this, trying to take advantage of the circular shape of the light. I quite liked the results, but couldn’t shake this feeling that it would look so much better if it was perfect circle with crisp sharp edges, which was the start of an obsessive journey to trying to create this.

I had a quick google and you can buy photographic torches, which come with different attachments, for projecting different shapes. But they all start around the £50 mark, and none of the product photos seemed like real world shots, they gave me this horrible feeling it would turn up be a bit rubbish.

As my search went on, I thought about just creating the effect afterwards on the computer. I took two photos here, one with the flash and one without, then layered them and removed a circle slice. This creates the nice sharp edges I’m looking for, but it doesn’t look quite right.

After a bit more googling, it turns out I am looking for a gobo light, which importantly can be focused to achieve those crisp edges. These kind of set ups start getting properly expensive, and look way too cumbersome to carry round on a solo photo walk.

I have these little cheap LED lights circle lights, which I thought might work in a pinch, but once you move more than a metre away the circle becomes impossibly large, so that option was a non starter.

I had to get creative, and I was thinking I have plenty of old vintage film lenses, why don’t I see if I can adapt one of those. I had a play around with an olympus OM lens and a torch, and with a little bit of focusing I was there, I had a perfect circle of light projected on to the wall.

I tried a combo of torches and tubes, and after some trial and error this was my janky looking final solution. It won’t win any awards for aesthetics (or durability) but it does the job, and I can move the torch up and down the tube to perfectly. focus my projected circle. I found it’s really important to keep the lens of the torch as clean as possible, I couldn’t figure out why my circle was spotty and blotchy at first, even though I had cleaned the lens perfectly, until I realised it was all the dust in the torch itself. I’m magnifying the beam, which is then just magnifying all the dust and dirt.

I’ve used this set up a few times now, these are the results. It’s another thing to add to my bag, so it doesn’t come with me that often, especially as it’s so fiddly to use, I have to use the camera on a tripod, I just don’t have enough arms to do it any other way.