Buddy, have you got a strobe?

I've always enjoyed a good cigar. You know, I was never able to get this one lit. You see, I was using a small strobe hidden in my hand to simulate the lighting of this cigar.

I bought a small strobe from a garage sale about 15 years ago for about 5 bucks and hacked it. I removed the small flash tube from the casing of the strobe and extended it with about 20 inches of wire, sort of a strobe on a rope.

By placing this small flash tube in my hand and hiding the wire, I am able to produce images like the one here.

This really is a cheap strobe, ever heard of a focal M200? You see these types of strobes at garage sales and second hand stores everywhere. For a few buck, it's worth hacking your own and exploring way of using it. Lighting a cigar seemed a logical use, I'm sure you can find others as well.

Attached to the bottom of the flash is a photo slave I had laying around the studio. We used another strobe in the room to fire this one.

You can see here how small the flash tube is, I still needed to knock back the out put using tissue paper over the flash tube.