New Gear: The Light Blaster Turns Your Gear into a Strobe Powered Projector

The Light Blaster is a newly announced, $100 photographic projector. But it isn’t just any projector, capable of throwing an image against your subject during a photoshoot. Instead it takes gear you already own, and transforms it into a strobe powered projector for brief blasts of intense light.

Rather than having a bright light shining on your subjects face the entire time, the Light Blaster is an adapter for a speedlight and lens. You load up the strobe on one side, put in a transparency or piece of slide film, and then mount one of your lenses on the other. Since it’s a standard camera flash, you can control it using the standard methods, so it only fires when you’re ready, and when it does, it creates a dramatic and bright effect.

The ability to swap in and out your own lenses also means that you can dramatically alter the projection for different purposes. You can have a small, tight, and bright projection over a limited area, or spread the image over a huge swathe of your shot.

The Light Blaster comes standard with a Canon EF mount, but you can use adapters to mount other types — either by picking up your own, or buying a Nikon adapter directly from the manufacturers. They’ll also sell you some transparencies, but otherwise you can dig up any old slides you have floating around, and use those instead.

For a look at some of what people are doing with the Light Blaster, you can see a gallery here.