Tech Tuesdays - Snoot!

Photo credit: Flickr user - morberg

Photography is all about light. If you can control light, you can improve your photographs immensely. One way to control your light is with a snoot. What is a snoot? A snoot is simply a long, narrow attachment for the end of your flash or strobe. Instead of light "spraying" out of your flash, a snoot shapes and controls the light into a narrow and well-defined "stream". Imagine how water gushes out of an outdoor faucet when it's turned on. Now, attach a hose to that faucet and you have a nice, controlled stream of water. That's what a snoot does!

You can purchase snoots of all shapes and sizes, but you can also make your own very easily. For my hot-shoe flash, I use a heavy cardboard tube that's about 16" long. The flash fits inside of it perfectly and the light that comes out the other end is quite nice. Not too bad for free, right? You can also just roll up paper or use gaffer tape to make a quick and custom snoot. Sure, you can always buy one, but free is good! I'm sure if I used larger studio strobes I wouldn't want to bother making my own snoot, but for a hot-shoe flash, it's really easy to do.

So why do you need to control light? What's wrong with just using a flash as a flash? If you want to create a spotlight effect where an object is bathed in a pool of light that is surrounded by darkness, you might just need a snoot. If you want to light just a portion of your subject without lighting the rest, you might just need a snoot. If you want to create dramatic light without a bunch of spilled light reflecting and filling your dramatic shadows, you might just need a snoot. If you want to shoot a beam of light through a column of smoke without letting any light touch the background so that only your smoke is lit, you might just need a snoot.

Here are a few examples of images take with and without snoots:

This image was taken with a snoot on the flash. Notice how there is mostly just light on the angel and not much on the surrounding table? With an even smaller snoot, I could have just lit the angel.

This image was taken without a snoot on the flash. The light was not focused and therefore hit the angel and the table. Furthermore, the extra light that hit the table bounced back up and lit the angel even more than I wanted.

If you're not convinced that you need to buy a snoot, try making one! All it really takes is some paper and tape. If that's all it takes to push your images to the next level, you'd be crazy to not try it!

You can see more images in which I've used a snoot here, here , here and here. You can also just search for "snoot" on Flickr to see the variety of images you can produce with such a simple tool and a little creativity.