Small Lights, No Problem
Our journey as photographers almost always revolves around gear. We love gear and we believe that it is the gear that is stopping us from becoming great. I know this because I have also been on your journey. Along the way I realized that it was not the gear that was holding me back, it was my lack of imagination with the gear I had. Let me share with you a recent encounter I had which I thought I would share with you.
I was recently part of the launch of the new Godox AD100pro, it is a small compact light with an output of about 100 watts. When I say small and compact, it is the size of a beer can in South Africa. The new light got a lot of positive feedback from all who attended but there were quite a few who believed that it was far to small and under powered to make a difference in their photography. The price however was good which allows you to move from the standard flash and into a mini strobe.
I decided to to put the little monster to the test.
The image below shows you my first setup. The light is at 1/8th power and my Camera settings are 160th sec @ f8, ISO 200. I was already impressed.
These are some of the images from the set.
I then moved the light outside the door to create more of different mood by creating more shadows. The camera settings remained the same but I upped the power of the light to 1\4 power. I could have however kept the same power and just opened up my aperture by 1 stop.
So this is what we got from that setup.
Here we moved the light so we could get the light to fall onto the wall.
Now just experimenting with different shooting angles.
Here I used my 24mm to create a wider shot
So as you can see I did not use any diffusion on the light, mainly because it does not come with an adaptor to fit a diffuser (you can use a Godox S-2 bracket which will allow you to use any Bowens mount diffuser)
The next task was to see if I could use this hard light to create a soft light.
My setup was as follows, I bounced the light into my V-Flat thereby making it a lot bigger and creating a much softer light. I did up the power to full power as a lot of the light is absorbed by the V-Flat.
You can see by the shadows how soft the light is
This is just to show the light fall was good enough to shoot this.
So in a nutshell, don’t let your gear get in the way of using your imagination and creating some great images.
Thanks for listening to me ramble, until net time…..keep pushing yourself.
If you would like, I did a live shoot using the AD100pro which you can view CLICK HERE