Understanding Ring Lights / Ring Flashes: A Lighting Tutorial by TheSlantedLens

 A great lighting tool is the Ring Light or Ring Flash. The Ring Light was invented in the 1950's as a light source to capture medical images. Fashion photographers and DP's soon found this great light source and used it to shoot people. It's perfect because it creates a wonderful highlight on the skin and allows the shadows to fall away from the camera. This video is a look at how to use a Ring Light or Ring Flash. Keep those cameras rolling and keep on click'n! by theslantedlens.com (Jay P. Morgan)

There are also passive light modifiers, which will shape the light from an ordinary (shoe mount) flash into that of a ring flash. The adapters use a series of diffusers and reflectors to "bend" the light in an arc around the lens axis. The light is then emitted from that arc. This maintains any through-the-lens (TTL) lighting functions that may be shared by the camera and flash, as the actual light source has not changed.

Ring flash as a lighting technique has enjoyed a strong resurgence over the last few years,^[when?] as photographers realize that it is far more useful than the one-look way in which it has been used for decades. Specifically, it is now being used primarily as a fill light to raise the illumination level of shadows created by other, off-axis lights. It is considered^{[by whom?]} to be a particularly good source of fill light, because it does not create harsh shadows.

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