hey everyone norm from tested here and i thought it'd be fun to wrap
up this week with a bit of a show-and-tell as well as a demonstration
and talking about some of my favorite photography gear that i use at home
primarily for photographing my collectibles my miniatures
and my sixth scale figures so over the course of this lockdown i've been
redoing my home office and studio putting up some better organization
for storage for display as well as decking out
my kind of workspace here i work on basically
a round table which i have my laptop or i do product photography and
collectibles photography it's not a formal studio but i'm making deal with
the space i have as well as the gear that i can get to
fit in this space so we're going to talk a
little bit about lighting and my favorite products i've been using
recently the way i've been mounting that lighting
for photography as well as doing a little bit of a
demonstration we're gonna photograph this figure one of my
favorites photography scene this is war machine mark six from
avengers end game made by hot toys you can get it at sideshow collectibles
and i just love this depiction of roadie it's don sheedle of course
wonderful likeness it's die cats it's heavy duty
incredibly posable as you can see and so i'm gonna have fun
photographing that for you but let's start with
the lights so you know if you've watched our videos you know that adam built for
example he had his lighting system for his
workbench and he uses led lights so this is something you can
buy online really affordable it's like 30 to 40
dollars it's bi-color so you can have change
color temperature warm or cold you can change the
intensity uh and it plugs in very simply and
mountable so you got your standard uh quarter 20 port on the
bottom and adam has it mounted on his lockline
gooseneck system wired through which works great for his
workbench but here the brightness is a little bit
overkill for me um because a little bit does go a long way
with small scale photography and i don't
really want a big flood light like this i mean it
can work well as a key light but placing it a little further away and
also when you're spending that much money on a light you do get
some of the byproducts of a cheaper led system so there's only so
much you can change in terms of the
luminosity you do get it doesn't it's not very balanced in
terms of the color temperature as you change from warm to cold and if
you take photographs sometimes you do get
that telltale kind of green tinting which of course you can fix
in posts if you shoot with raw but this ends up not being my light
of choice at home uh something i was clued into last year and and this
being my one of my go-to's are these lume cubes so
starchy bananas clued me into this and these are wonderful really high
power led lights uh that also have a wonderful range of
accessories and all the lights i'm talking about today
also uh run off of battery power uh in addition to also being uh workable
if you want to plug it in so that's again adds a little bit of versatility
and what i love about this is it gets extremely bright so for the type
of photography i like doing because i don't have a
proper studio set up what i end up doing is
this kind of low-key style where i underexpose my photos i
use really bright lights and so the
background kind of fades hopefully into uh darkness kind of blurs together
and so i really want some high focus bright
light and then exposed lower so the figure the
subject still looks good and i can have very
targeted lights and so when you have accessories that
like these barn doors or a mini snoot basically it becomes you
know like a mini photo studio or a film studio which kind
of makes sense because i'm shooting miniatures so very happy with these
um not extremely cheap but really really powerful accompanying those
recently i've been using these aputure led lights joey
has been a fan of this company and he uses some of their lights for location
shoots he's talked about them in his behind the
scenes production videos and this mx light again runs off of
battery also bi-color gets extremely bright i'm
not properly exposed for it right now but
let's turn it on and you can see yeah it gets this is really bright and i
believe that's the dimmest it goes which is
still good if i want to boost it up very bright and
even goes even brighter there's a 30 boost button um it goes from warm to
cold and very balanced and looks right
in under the camera lens and uh battery life for this unfortunately
about an hour and max brightness and i tend to do use it at max brightness
so you do have to kind of plug it in there's a usb c port that i leave
plugging in when i'm not using it to keep it charged it doesn't
get super warm which is something the loom cubes do that you get
very very hot almost the touch when you use them at full brightness
there's a big heat sink here which keeps us relatively cool
very versatile in studio in a home office like this but also
we've used this on location as well it does get lost if you're using big
production lights or you know it doesn't read of course in in
daylight in the bright sky but in studio very powerful very
versatile also from aputure uh i recently got
these in these are the mcs uh so form factor wise
look very similar to the mx is no heat sink in the back uh but they do
um magnetic charging inductive charging with a carrying case they have and the
big difference also is that these are rgbw so you can change
color temperature on these and also color on these um there's a tiny lcd
screen here where you can adjust some of the
settings um and you know a jog dial on the side to
do that but primarily i've been using this with an
accompanying app for phone or tablet the ipad app is my favorite so
far although there is an up charge at the
pay for that app but with that app if you have these
mcs they connect over bluetooth you can connect a ton of them
to the ipad and then group them create presets and then have all sorts of
adjustment where you can for example not only
adjust the brightness and color temperature if you want to go
warm or cold but also a variety of colors
as well turn down the brightness just a little bit but yeah
variety of colors as well as effects so very useful
if you're using this as a fill light uh if you can do things like for example
police sirens um or a campfire you get a little bit
warmer if you can see that but yeah it's kind of pulsating
with warm light uh which is neat they don't get as bright as
the mx is and so primarily i've been using them as
fill lights kind of placing them around the room around my subjects
and giving a little bit of color experimenting with that because that's
not something i've been doing and been doing a lot in the past
with and then in terms of placing these lights
around the subjects around my little set here
i've been on this quest to find a good way to do so
i mentioned adam has his lock line system
his goofy neck system where he wires uh his led panels through and they work
they're adjustable but if you've seen any of our videos you
might have seen him actually adjust them in camera because they do
tend to droop they don't hold their position
as well as i would like they're great for kind
of moving in big movements but not if you want
really pinpoint precision and so i've looked at things like you can get tiny
tripod you know this is like ten dollars you can find online you
know they sit on your desk and you put a ball head on top then yeah you can very
easily place them around and then move your light but then you
don't have a lot of like vertical adjustability it doesn't
work if you want to have a light come down from the top for
example a big key light just kind of flooding the top
of your scene and so i looked in like you
know different types of clamps and ways i can attach a light to
an arm and there are these kind of spring boom arm systems i
actually use one for mounting a phone camera for an
overhead shot for this desk and i can mount a light on
that and that's pretty good as well they're you know fairly stable they
don't bounce a lot but again the range of movement for the
light is also a little bit limiting uh the range
of movement is increased if you go with one of these type of you know wire
mounts that you can use for you know phone clamps and you clamp the other
side to your desk and i don't like these at
all i think they they don't hold their
position you really have to fight against them
to get whatever you want into a position um and they're really kind of a last
resort for me what i ended up using though was this
system you actually they're in frame this whole time it's a combination of
two different mounts uh we'll start at what's
connected to the table so clamp to a table
is this 31 inch split in a three sections
uh arm that is designed for mounting webcams and
and small objects and yeah you could put like a gopro on it not really for
your dslrs a point-and-shoot i think would fit on this
just fine but what i like about this system is that it's
rigid it's locked in place and there are two points that you can adjust
as well as the rotation along the clamp but you can see here if i loosen this up
this arm has the ability to go pretty freely and if i loosen a second
axis up then i can really kind of bend it
wherever i want get real high up or extend it far
out and it's pretty versatile that way and then once i have kind of the first
stage of positioning then i tighten those up
and they stay locked in place they're actually
teeth that interlock at these hinges here
so really rigid now that doesn't get me exactly where i want the light to be and
it's not something i wanted to kind of adjust
for every shot so on top of that on this quarter 20 i've mounted this
small mini magic arm and this has been wonderful they sell these
i think small arm makes one but you can get it again online for about
10 15 it's not expensive at all and you can use them people have mounted
them on top of your cold shoe ports for mounting like a monitor
or lights and uh the reason i'm combining these systems is because
this mini small arm which is wonderful it's a one point of adjustment
two ball heads that i can really really position
this anywhere i want uh it only is about nine or ten inches so i wish there
was a system where the small arm could be clamped to the table and that's
all i need like one point to adjust this light to wherever i want to go but
because it only is about 10 inches i have to combine it with
this other system but it works out really really well
so if i want to get low i can do that if i
want to aim this light from basically any angle
i basically have six degrees of freedom of movement
for positioning it and then once i get it to exactly where i want to be
let's say right here then i just tighten this one knob
up and it's locked into place pretty nice i've been using
it on both sides of the table here so i
actually have it here as well with the aperture mx as
my overhead and yeah uh it's exactly what i was looking
for short of having you know kind of a mini
c stand i could put on the table and place the light it gets me to a
place where i can have a key light a filled light a catch light
placed anywhere i want around a subject and i can get to taking the photos i
want so let's go take some photos i'm going to clear off
this table we're going to set up war machine here
i'm going to again go with kind of a low-key style where
i want to pm to be shrouded around in the darkness
uh try different poses we'll start off with like a standard museum pose
and then head off into lightroom where i'll walk you through my thought process
into taking these pictures all right so you can see i'm already
adjusting my lights here i'm using two primary lights to start just to show you
how effective you can get a shot just with two lights
uh i love for this type of photography just using one
big overhead key light so i have the aperture mx
mounted on top and because this war machine figure has
nice reflective silver surfaces especially his face plate that's gonna
work really well for that being not to there so just
doing a very standard what's called a museum pose
arms to the side even then i don't want to look too stiff so i'm
bending his knees a little bit um having his arms out
you have interchangeable hands so i have that him kind of like in this con
tense pose do a couple test shots before just make sure i have my framing
stuff right and then i have my uh
my catch light to make sure i get that glint
in his eye which is what i really want so the loom cube there
adjusting the barn doors and making sure that i can catch that reflectivity
in his eye around his mask by creating still some hard shadows around him and
while it looks bright here you can see that once i expose it it
actually looks pretty subdued and these are the
museum hoses so
once i'm happy with that i'm going to keep this lighting set up again just
two lights one big overhead and then one catch light
aim at the face and then try a couple different poses my number one
recommendation for people want to get into this type of photography
is take a ton of photos so get a pose where you feel like you
like what you see and then go take 20 30 40
50 photos in that pose because by the end of that session
you're gonna find something that you didn't know you like from the beginning
of that session whether it's a different angle a different focal length a
different pose that you might want to go with and
so you know while these are both still kind of static museum poses i like
this looking off into the distance especially
with that shoulder cannon pointed off i think i like that a lot
more um and then adjusting it again making
sure maybe i'll adjust that catch light so i
catch both his eyes as opposed to just one eye again focusing right on his face
right there a little bit of warm light there while the
key light is pretty cold and that's my museum pose
and here are the photos that i ended up with
really liking so from here let's go with a more dynamic pose
and reposing it always a lot of fun with the
sixth scale hot toys figures so war machine comes with a flight stand
so he can be elevated pretty securely so i'm gonna go with
i mean action pose change the hands out get him to more of a
ready to fire his repulsor blasters i don't have the batteries installed
right here because because the way i'm lighting this figure
all the internal lighting will get lost so i'm going to try to compensate for
that with a little bit of fill light and creating some color
with the aputure mz
you can see i'm using the app the ipad app to tweak my lighting profiles just
to see what might work i have two fill lights
one left side one the right side the one on the left uh is kind of low
and so it's kind of coming upward so you can see it's catching
right on um his hands a little bit on his
face as well as on the chest plate uh and a little bit of reposing
but i think that's going to really help give this figure some life and some
action a little bit of that red glow so that's
the pose i'm liking again take a ton of pictures
of the pose different angles kind of get up close
move further out try to help it fill the frame a little bit
and then you know delete as you go review the pictures
as you go so you know what you like and by the end of the session you probably
will come out with something that you like so let's take a look at
these finished photos thanks so much for watching hope you
enjoyed this photography session i have links to
all the gear i mentioned in the descriptions below but let me know what
gear you like using what lights you use what
kind of mounting systems you use for your studio
setups i'd love to know please post them in the
comments below and i'll see you next time bye