I submit for your approval (as Rod Serling used to say) the Neewer R-160S LED ring light. I’d like to bring to your attention a battery-powered LED ring light that was designed for macro photography. The first thing I did after I got it, of course, was to try to misuse this light for portrait photography with an unanticipated lens (the Nikkor 85mm f/1.4).
This particular LED is built like a tank out of anodized aluminum and has to be powered from a voltage supply plugged into a wall socket.
The 6 “flower petals” around the ring light house the 6 AA batteries in little slide-open drawers. This ring light can be mounted three ways: onto your lens filter thread, onto the camera hotshoe, and onto a tripod.
At 50mm with longer focus distances, you’ll need to fix edges being dimmer with your photo editor; macro range lighting is fine. Personally, I just use the largest provided 67mm adapter and then attach it to either my step-up or step-down rings to use it with my lenses ranging from 52mm to through 77mm filter threads.
This problem took maybe 2 seconds to discover after I turned on the ring light after mounting it onto my Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 lens. In the shot above, you can see that the inner portion of the ring light is just transparent plastic, lined by many LEDs.
This inner portion of lights causes massive lens flare, since the LEDs shine directly into most lenses! I traced and then cut out a circle of painter’s tape to put over the outside of the ring light.
Just the inner portion of the ring light is exposed before unleashing the (plastic-compatible) spray paint. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to see if this ring light would work with my Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 lens (filter thread 77mm). To test how this combination would work, I photographed a blank wall at f/1.4 and saw NO corners cut off and the shot was evenly illuminated. Stopping down the lens, the illumination got even better, since the 85 has a fair amount of built-in vignetting when shot wide-open.
The ring light makes shots look more like they were done in a studio, and they don’t scream “flash”. In times past, I would have had to use a different lens to get this shot, because my metal riing light wouldn’t fit onto the 105mm Micro Nikkor.
Neewer 48 Macro LED Ring Flash Bundle with LCD Display Power Control Adapter Rings and Flash Diffusers for Canon 650D 600D 550D 70D 60D 5D Nikon D5000 D3000 D5100 D3100 D7000 D7100 D800 D800E D60
I really love all the different diffusers and filters it comes with as they all add really nice effects to my photos.
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