You might consider a ring light to be a specialized tool for glamour photography and you'd be at least partially right. Ring lights are commonly used to create sexy specular light rings in the eyes of supermodels, but they are actually a lot more generally useful and building your own is trivially easy and inexpensive. The project came in under $30 and will take about an hour.

A ring light is simply a light that rings your camera's lens and shines light directly at your subject, potentially resulting in a very flat and stark look. You'll see the look in fashion magazines and portraits all the time. And you might notice the cool ring in a model's eyes on occasion. As you might guess, the look can be distracting when overused. Listerine recently used a ring light to create a "from the mirror" PoV shot in an ad that was quite effective and interesting, for example.

Of course, if you are going to draw all of this attention to your subject's eyes, it might help if they are young and hot or if you want to do some artsy thing with it, but ring lights are much more broadly useful. For example, how are you going to light a very small object on a stage without casting a giant shadow? Well, with a ring light of course.

And while some ring lights are composed of dozens of individual lamps arranged and wired in a ring, the most obvious ring light idea is to just use a fluorescent tube in the shape of a ring.

Obvious, yes, but unfortunately, you can't just plug a fluorescent tube into the wall. In the interest of not boring you to death, let's just say that you need to match the power supply ballast starter thingee with your fluorescent tube. There's a code on the ballast to match the tube. In my case, for example, I wanted to use an 8" Circline 22w lamp. The box for the tube said I needed a "T9" ballast and I ended up with an "FC8T9" which is probably code for "Fluorescent Circline 8-inch T9" ballast. I'd recommend hassling one of the clerks in the lighting section to explain it to you and pick out the right fixture + matching tube. That's what I did.

Here's what I used, although there are literally dozens of homemade DIY Ring Light projects you can find on the Interwebs. For my kit, I selected a $20 ceiling mount fixture with two ballasts, one for a 22w 8" fluorescent ring and one for a 32w 12" ring. There were ballasts that were as cheap as $6 as well, but I went with this for flexibility: the 22w alone should throw about 100w of incandescent-equivalent light, the 32w about 150w and together I'll get 250w, which gives me rather a lot of light and three options. The tubes were about $6 each. Watch the color temperature: I got 3000K rings to match the rest of my studio fluorescents, softwhite incandescents and tungsten-halogen shop lights.

Because the lights are cool, you have a lot of possible mounting options. I did not come up with any sort of brillant solution to this and my mount is merely functional. The lamps are very delicate, but light, so you need something secure, but not necessarily strong. And it'll have to have a big hole in the middle so you can stick your camera in behind it. Of course, you'll also need some sort of stand as well.

Wiring is very easy, although you are playing with very high voltages, so extreme caution is advised. Any mounted fixture is going to have a ground, so use a grounded extension cord for your instrument if you need to. And be careful: if you become the ground at any point in this project, you are going to very quickly become a very sexy ring-light illuminated corpse.

Of course the 250w fluorescent ring light you just built doesn't have to be used for head-on ring lighting and makes an excellent little single-subject key or fill as well, so for $30 this is a pretty cool afternoon project that has both specialized and general uses.