Creating A Perfect Circle Of Light

I love playing around with a torch when taking photos at night, having a direct beam of light can look really interesting, especially if it’s foggy, as it seems to hang in the air, showing it’s full path.

I’ve got an old torch that projects a square when fully zoomed in, and I’ve taken a few photos using this to project a diamond of bright light on an otherwise dark scene.

My current torch can be zoomed to project a circle of light at it’s narrowest focus. I took a few photos trying to project a small circle of light, and quite liked the results, but couldn’t help think how they would look better if it was a perfect circle with crisp edges. This was the start of an obsessive journey to try and create this.

I had a quick google and you can buy photographic torches, which come with different attachments, and can supposedly project different shapes. But they all start around the £50 mark, and none of the product photos seemed to show actual shots of them in use, and I had a horrible feeling they wouldn’t create the effect I’m looking for.

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 research 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 little 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 I found this to be my janky 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 effectively magnifying the beam, which will also then magnify and dust and dirt.