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Today it’s about something you need but you could build yourself as well. This post will be about the HONL lighting gear for on camera flashes. Honl, a pro shooter from the USA, created a system of tuning your on camera flash. No softboxes, no umbrellas, no big lighting gear. It is all made for one purpose. SIZE SIZE SIZE!!!!
And Honl is right. It is harder to controll the light than to make it softer. Honl therefore made GELS, GOBOS and GRIDS.

We just bought us a set of stuff we now want to present to you. Grids, Gels and the straps to fix the stuff to the flashes. These are the things we HIGHLY RECOMMEND to always have in your bag.




The strap is attached to the flash with no glue, just strapped around the head of the flash. You can always sell or buy the flashes as there will be nothing left of the HONL system.

But you will certainly ask yourself why we are using something we already told everyone how to do it yourself. Everyone can build a grid out of straws, gels you can get from free filter packages directly from manufacturer LEE FILTERS. So, why do we pay a lot more money for this solution?

The answer is very simple. On camera flashes are pieces of the every-day-working-gear of us. We really use them and we do need them as small little, portable flashes. And forming the light coming out of these flashes is every-day-work. Every DIY solution is functional but it is still not pretty robust. Take for example, the little filter gels. When taking them out of the filter box, we always lost the most important filters. You need a CTO filter and you don’t have the filter because you lost the little paper during the last shooting. Sure, you can write the name of the filter on it, but still, we got a lot of troubles with those little filters.
The Honl filters are bigger in size and they are already named.


The same with the grids. Our selfmade grids never lasted longer than 4-5 shootings. After that, they fell apart or were “squeezed to death” in between our gear. The grids made by HONL have a very strong surrounding frame and the grid is nicely protected.
It is cheaper to buy one grid for 15 Euros than to build 20 grid yourself. It is not worth the time and it still costs some euros to buy the glue and straws. As you can see, it’s a matter of calculation.
And to end this posting, I will give you a very important hint for your future usage of filter gels. When working with maximum power of your on camera flash together with gels, you will clearly experience one not so nice result. The gels can melt down due to the heat of the flash. Every time you fire the flash, you damage your gel more and more. You can’t really change that fact unless you do the following:
Normally you attache the strap onto you flash plane to the front. Take a look at the picture below.

Next time you use your gel on your on-camera-flash. You let some space free in between the gel and the flash.

You can additionally move the strap forward over the end of the flash. Then you have the gel a lot more away from the flashtube. NO MORE MELTING DOWN YOUR GEL!!!!

BYEBYE… Martin