Lighting with a difference

Over the last couple of years I have slowly built up a collection of speedlights and accessories initially with the aim of having some easily transportable and easy to use lighting when shooting outside the studio. This week I took that a little further by actually bringing the speedlights into the studio.

Why, you may ask, would you do that when you have perfectly good lights in the studio to start with? A good question and really the only reason I did it was because I had a few ideas and I couldn’t work out how to easily achieve them in the studio with traditional studio strobes.

The first of these was using gels with softboxes. Normally when using gels the gel is fixed over a reflector on the front of a strobe either by tape or a slot in a barn door fixed to the reflector, but what I wanted to try and achieve was a greater spread of softer light by using a stripbox. I’m sure there are ways that this could be achieved with studio lights but I couldn’t think of one that was as cheap and simple as the one I adopted with my speedlights.

Below is an adaptor that I have that allows me to use any Bowens fit accessory with my speedlights just by clamping the speedlight into the centre of the ring. The clamp also serves the purpose of holding the strip of gel in place over the flash head. All that remains is to fit the softbox to the ring. If you want to change the colour of the gel it is as easy as loosening the clamp sliding out the speedlight and fitting a new gel before sliding back into place.. 

I was very pleased with the results and of course an added bonus is that you only need a small piece of gel to cover the head of the speedlight. If you’re looking for downsides, the one you will always have with speedlights is that you don’t have a modelling light but I find that is something you soon get used to. So that was the first of my experiments with speedlights in the studio and I will share more as they happen but for now I’ll leave you with a few of the gel shoots from my shoot with Rhianna.

Rhianna returns to JFYP Studio for a group shoot in April

Group Shoot with Rhianna Grey at JFYP Studio Saturday 14th. April 2018

 

 

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