Introduction

Light is underappreciated as a way to improve the quality of an indoor environment. The technology has only gotten to the point relatively recently where the energy cost and technology make it feasible to implement adaptive lighting setups with the output to sufficiently light an interior space.

I'm in front of the computer a lot and spend too much time indoors, so indoor light quality has a disproportionate impact on my mood. Good incentive to understand how it impacts mood, energy levels, and sleep quality.

Based on my experience, the areas of opportunity are in matching color temperature to time of day, improving the Color Rendering Index, increasing lumen output during the day, and automation.

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Introduction

Macro photography (I dabble) requires a lot of available light or good artificial lighting. Small apertures for wide depth-of-field and close focusing distances limit the amount of light that gets to the sensor. Normal speedlites can work fine to augment or replace ambient light, but when you're shooting freehand it's difficult to handle a flash and the camera.

A flash like the Canon MT-24EX is a good solution for keeping all of the parts on the camera, but at close to $1,000, it's difficult to justify on top of your existing flashes. Wimberley's F-2 macro flash bracket is an excellent compromise. With it, you can mount one or two regular speedlites to a tripod colar and position them using the balljoint arms. Problem is, they run $169 per arm.

The Wimberley components are of very high quality, so the price is justified, but since they use slightly-customized RAM Mounts equipment for most of the flash arm, it's simple to construct a DIY solution slightly more cheaply.

Other people have documented this approach, but based on my difficulty finding the correct parts from their instructions, I'm not sure how many of them have actually assembled the bracket.

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