The Orbis is a photography accessory that slides onto a standard shoe-mount flash unit and allows it to produce a “ring-light” effect.

There, that should placate the search-engine robots — which, I’m told, like to have all a story’s key words crammed into its first paragraph. Now I’ll try again, for humans:

The Orbis is a giant plastic bagel that that slides onto a standard shoe-mount flash unit and allows it to produce a “ring-light” effect. It’s ingenious, effective, reasonably efficient… and makes you look as if your professional name should be Kliko the Foto Klown.

You know how, in old kings-and-knights movies, the Court Jester is always portrayed holding a rattle thing on a stick? The Orbis is just like that — except bigger and emitting bursts of light, to make extra-sure nobody ignores how silly you look holding it.

To be fair(ish), this isn’t the fault of the flashy part of the Orbis. What’s inside the bagel — a system of silvery plastic arcs — does an amazingly good job of bending the light from a regular flash into a smoothly-distributed circle. I did get the feeling that its near-$200 pricetag covers about $3 worth of plastic and $197 worth of clever design and marketing — but at least it delivers.

These deliberately-underexposed pictures show that the light distribution isn't perfect, but pretty good. Instructions say to zoom the flash head to maximum (left) but I got more even distribution at 50mm (right.)

No, the problems all stem from how the bagel attaches to the flash. You see, the Orbis is designed to attach to a lot of flashes and a lot of cameras… which means that it isn’t a really good fit on anything.

The attachment method consists of a snout protruding from the side of the bagel, into which you shove your flash unit. There’s a springy plastic clip inside the snout — but to accommodate a wide variety of flashes, the clip has to be pretty loose. The result is that the assembly is held together solely by a combination of friction, gravity, and wishful thinking.

The unadorned Orbis is designed to be used hand-held. You hold the camera with your right hand. Meanwhile, you somehow contort your left hand into a Vulcan Death Grip that grasps both the Orbis snout and your flash, without obstructing any of the sensors on the front of the latter. When you’re ready to take a picture, you simply hold the Orbis’ bagel hole over your lens and release the shutter.

Need both hands free to adjust the camera and lens controls? No problem, as long as you happen to have a prehensile tail. Those of us deprived by evolution of this useful appendage have to let the Orbis-plus-flash dangle upside-down around our necks via a supplied lanyard, with the flash sticking upward out of the snout. Once the camera’s adjusted, you re-apply your Vulcan Death Grip and re-orient the bagel in front of the lens. And you have to do this every time you take a picture.

Astutely realizing that this inconvenience would become  homicidally infuriating in a matter of seconds, Orbis eventually released the Orbis Arm, a double-ended L-bracket that adds $50 to the price and lets you join all the pieces into a heavy but one-handable assembly. The bracket itself is widely adjustable, nicely finished and superbly solid. Again, though, the stupid snout-and-clip attachment system lets down the concept.

Teetering on top of the arm-mounted flash, the bagel constantly jiggles from side to side, wobbles back and forth, and clatters against the lens barrel like a cheap maraca. The only time it doesn’t look as if it’s about to fall off is when it actually does fall off. In short, it looks goofy; I can’t imagine using it for, say, executive portraiture. In fact, I can barely imagine using it in public at all. The reason that, so far, there are no live-model test shots accompanying this post is that I haven’t figured out how to unleash it on anybody I know without acute personal embarrassment.

Briefly, I contemplated firming up the joint between the Orbis and flash by customizing the snout with foam, balsa wood, or whatever for a tighter fit against the flash head. But after I looked more closely, I realized that wouldn’t be a good idea. The Orbis weighs half a kilogram (or about a pound) and the length of the snout gives it plenty of leverage against the flash. Too rigid an attachment, I figured, and it would be all too easy to break off the flash’s swivel head or support foot.

It looked as if I had just spent $250 — which is not an insignificant amount of money for me — on a cleverly conceived but unusably unwieldy gizmo that would spend its entire life in a drawer.

But then… I fixed it. Read Part II to see how.