As part of our continued service to you, EPUK news is delighted to be able to bring you a selection of great practical moneysaving ideas collated by the folks at Digital SLR Tips and Tricks.

For instance, free lens hoods. And not just free, but downloadable, flat-pack lens hoods you can keep on your laptop. Far more portable than original spec, and won’t be on back order from Japan for 12 weeks like the real thing. The only slight downside is that they’re made of paper. Oh, and don’t fit onto the lens without sticky tape. And will tend to dissolve all over the front element if it rains. But brilliant nonetheless – unless you use black paper, which you have to really else they’ll not work at all.

Not all the ideas are that clever or original. The improvised bounce reflector is one freebie we have all bodged at some time, usually with a page of newspaper, or the PR’s shirt. But the Oribounce takes it to a new, professional level of Origami that your colleagues will admire and envy.

For even more ambitious lighting set-ups at minimal cost, we bet you never thought of adapting discarded disposable film cameras, to turn them into slave flashguns? We certainly hadn’t. All it requires is several weeks work, a PhD in electronics, and a shop full of electronic components.

The writer warns “It may take so long to trip the relay (RLY2) that the digital camera exposure will be over before the disposable flash goes off. An SCR [that’s a Silicon Controlled Rectifier, for those of you who spent Science class studying Susie Derkins’ undone middle blouse button] would take care of this, and would eliminate any time spent to flip the relay. Just replace the RLY2 with an SCR that is capable of handling 400V, and edit the code to change any delays. Also this code had a switch debounce subroutine, which I edited to make a 10ms delay. (I took the switch debounce program from the pickit1 tutorial and edited it to make my program)”. Well, obviously!

The other thing to watch out for is electrocuting yourself off the disposable’s 300v capacitor charge. But the look on your client’s face as you prepare to shoot their CEO using a stack of butchered disposables will be well worth any pain and physical injury when you explain ‘what do you expect at the rates you pay?”