- What's going on fellas?
Today, we're talking all about lighting.
Pita says hi, but this video isn't about you,
it's about lights.
But I've been testing out a new light for the last month,
and I'm super happy about it.
It's definitely way up here on my recommended list,
but first, why don't we talk about my older favorite light.
Right here, this thing, the Aputure 120D.
That used to be my primary light.
It was right here, front and center,
just doing all this nice soft lighting on me.
Now, the reason why that was my favorite light
for so long was because, first of all,
it wasn't super expensive.
It was, like, right around 600 bucks
and some of you guys might be like,
holy (bleep), that's expensive,
because there are some lights out there for like 100 bucks.
But if you compare it to like, other lights
that are like thousands and thousands of dollars,
it's a solid deal.
I would actually consider it to be
the least expensive light that's professional grade.
Also, the color of light coming out of there is very good.
It has a very high TLCI rating,
meaning it looks very natural,
and I even did a blind side by side test awhile ago.
This one's by far the crowd favorite and I agree.
It looks very nice and it's important
to have skin tones under this light
look very natural, opposed to putting in
little tints of green or magenta,
which could start making you look not as beautiful.
Look how pretty I am right now.
This lighting's great, I love it.
Honestly, I would say most of the time,
lighting is more important than the camera you have.
'Cause with good lighting like this,
even if I just shoot it on my iPhone like this,
it looks pretty decent.
The light itself was super bright,
but you could also dial it down if you need to.
You could attach a big soft box like what I have up here,
so the light comes and hits me nice and softly.
Or you can even focus it with a fresnel.
I did a whole video about 10 different lighting setups
you can do with just one single light.
So, it's very flexible, very powerful.
You can run it off a V-mount battery
if you don't have access to household power.
And the fixture itself is very small
compared to like crap like this.
I've taken it to a bunch of different shoots.
It's traveled with me everywhere
and it hasn't let me down yet.
But, obviously, nothing's perfect,
so I did have some complaints.
Now my biggest complaint was that you had to connect
this thing into this controller with this cable,
which is about like, five feet long
and so you need cable as well.
And then this controller connects to a power brick
with another cable about 4 to 5ft long
and then it connects to the wall
using another cable that's a couple feet long.
So it was super annoying trying to set this up
on a stand up high, and then you can't just dangle
this thing on the cable, so you have to to figure out
a place to kinda hang this.
And then if you want to hang this thing up kinda high,
then that power brick is dangling
and it was always this kind of a hassle of like,
okay, where to mount this thing.
Next up is this tightening knob right up here.
Which is fine if you're just running it just like this,
to adjust that tail, but once you start putting on
something bigger like a dome light on here,
then you really have to tighten this thing down
and you're kinda concerned about breaking the thing.
Now this is where it mounts onto a light stand.
It's weird because out of like the 10 C-stands we have,
it only just doesn't fit two of them.
I don't know how to say this without it turning into, like,
a rated R joke.
The silver standard C-stands are totally fine
but two, it does not pay it on,
on the Matthews,
black.
I want to say ...
I swear the black ones come a little bit thicker,
so I'm gonna get lit up in the comments now.
Great. The arm was by Mathew,
so it's very possible
that they accidentally machine one,
just slightly thicker than it's supposed to be.
So that might not be Aputures fault,
but it also doesn't hurt to just make this
a tad bit bigger so you can slide this on.
Even just the missed sized arms or light stands.
Also there's this one screw holding on this
to the light itself
and its come loose on me a couple different times
because there's only one screw there.
Now obviously, these are all very minor issues
so if you've got one
it's still going to do the job just fine,
but it has been demoted from my favorite light
because that 120D Mark II that I'm using,
which is the newer version of this,
fixed all those problems
and it's brighter.
Now what's really awesome about
having multiple Aputure lights
is that they all come with this remote
and they're very, very easy to use.
If you'd like, I can literally adjust everything from here.
I should get that one replaced with the Aputure light II,
so I could just like literally just do all my adjustments
just from right here and be lazy.
120D Mark II is a bit more expensive than that
original 120D,
but because of those issues that I mentioned with that,
I definitely think it's worth that extra little bit
to get the 120D Mark II.
Most obvious difference is that
it is brighter and a lot of times
you don't need nearly that much output.
Right now I have it at 55%
and I have it going through a Dome Light soft box.
I'll put the camera back and you can see.
Literally if I crank this thing all the way up,
I would just go blind.
Whoa.
So when you consider the size of this thing
and the amount of output it puts out,
it's really, really impressive.
You definitely don't always need that much output,
but it definitely helps to have that option.
The first shoot I ever took it all,
we were on a top floor of a building
shooting outside of a window.
Interior was dark, the outside bright,
so you're literally trying to match the output of the sun,
which is really difficult to do.
But if you walk this thing in and crank it up,
you can get a lot of exposure out of this thing.
We were also doing some high speed video the other day.
We were shooting at 10,000 frames per second.
It was overcast that day,
so we didn't have that much natural light.
So we put a fresnel head on this 120D Mark II,
focused it in
(camera flickering)
and it was able to expose a 10,000 frames per second shot
without a flicker, which is really cool.
And also if it doesn't flicker at 10,000 frames per second,
you pretty much have nothing to worry about
when you're shooting slow motion with these lights.
Begin to look at the controller.
It's very familiar.
It is a little bit bigger,
but you don't have to worry about that power brick anymore.
So it's way easier than having to short little things
dangling off the light.
Man, that used to be a pain.
The crank to tighten the head
also much more robust and easier to do.
The mount itself is attached with two screws instead of one,
so I don't have to worry about it popping out on me.
They did a really great job with it
because it's like the 120D was an awesome light
and they just looked at every little thing
that anyone hadn't complained about it
and they fix it up.
I want to talk trash about this light right now,
so that you guys don't think it's a sponsored video,
even though it's not.
It's not a sponsored video.
(snaps finger)
I wish it was a jet pack also.
This totally make it
so you could put it on as a backpack
and just (mumbles)!
So I'm kind of disappointed they haven't done that.
Oh, I do wish that this light was bicolor,
so you could dial it from daylight to tungsten,
but it's also very simple to just gel these lights as well,
especially with the Mark II Light Domes.
This came with a filter holder,
so that makes it even simpler.
And again, there's so many different lights out there,
but this is the one light that kinda can do everything.
There's other lights like this that's flexible
and it's very bright, super durable.
It's very easy to pack.
You can shape it into all kinds of different ways,
but if you wanted to like focus the light,
or make a slash on a like kinda like
what this light's doing over here.
You can't really do that with this.
With these lights as pop on a fresnel
and some barn doors to cut it and there you go.
You want it to be super soft than get this dome light.
If you want it to be kind of soft
then get this dome light mini.
It's awesome because it's so versatile.
You can have this one light
and you can attach many different things out of it.
And also if you guys haven't seen what this Mark II does.
Oh my God, we all hate setting these things up, right?
Kinda align all those rods and stick it in.
These don't collapse the smallest, as the ones,
but man, the amount of time you saved to kinda set this up.
So much easier.
I love that thing.
You know, it started to get kind of dark.
Let's see how bright this thing can get outside.
All right, so one of the times you might want
all the power that this 120D has available to it
is a time when you have a really bright background,
like right now we're just hitting golden hour,
but we're in the shade,
so we're kind of in this dark parking.
Even though this sky is super bright
all the way up to 100% boom.
Let's see if it's bright enough
to light up this scene right here.
(camera flickers)
Oh, my eyes.
- I think it's good.
- Now we totally need to get you a Tinder profile pic.
- Okay.
(lively music)
- No, no, no. (chuckles)
That's not what I meant.
I'm gonna switch lenses real quick.
Hold on.
Look at that, (lively music)
you look nice and mysterious.
I feel like you've done this before.
- Oh, you've no idea. (chuckles)
- I would swipe right so hard.
(chuckles)
Whenever I would power off of the mount battery
like I'm doing right now.
When I would crank this thing all the way up to 100%
it would automatically shut off.
And what I realize now it was that it's not the lights fall,
it's actually the type of battery you have on here.
And when you have this sucker on, on full blast,
it needs about 180 Watts of power.
So that's a lot of power, it could put out a lot of output.
So my issue was I was kind of using low power,
low amp batteries,
but if you want it to get to 100%
without it shutting off on you,
then that's when you really want that high amperage battery.
So I'll link the ones to Aputure recommends
down in the description.
But again, you could use low powered ones
and get this thing all the way up to like 80% no problem.
What the hell is that?
What the, who the hell are you, and what the ...
- Gugugaga, mother (beep).
(giggles)
- And we're back.
I should edit my voice.
to sound all mysterious, like
(mumbles) on these people
I could have looked pretty scary
or I could be some kind of a tough guard.
But really, no, it's just me.
(chuckles)
Anyways, let's close this off
by reading a few comments from my last video,
which is all about the Weebill Lab Gimbal.
A pretty solid gimbal,
if you're looking for something to smooth it out,
a small mirrorless camera
and you want something that's very compact.
So a good travel option.
That comment was from the traveling clacks.
Here is Potato Jet juggling potatoes
"Made my morning today."
(chuckles)
I've actually been practicing here.
Check this out.
Check out these fresh new skills sucker.
What up!
I love learning random new crap like that.
What's another thing I should try?
Random stuff I should learn.
Give it to me down below in the comments.
I'll try to learn some new stuff.
Javier Mendez Photography says,
"I need one of my videos are shaky AF.
Sips fifth Cup of coffee.
(chuckles)
Javier, I'm right there with Ya
cause I'm always like jacked up on coffee
and my hands are always just like
(slurps)
I need as much image stabilization as possible.
City The great says,
"Practice one handed juggling with two objects,
"makes three object juggling easier."
Where were you one video ago
when I needed this advice.
That's not that easy.
This is honestly pretty freaking tough.
I'll be sure to practice that though.
"Will you be at NAB in Vegas next week?"
I will be there.
Maybe I'll see you there.
Jose Rodriguez says, "I don't really have friends,
but Potato Jet is like my brother,
"even though he doesn't know I exist."
I know Jose, that you exist.
I see you right there.
Your profile picture is a J
and it's all that,
that's yeah.
You seem like a cool guy though.
Samsung S10 plus versus Cinema camera.
I'm actually working on that right now.
You see it?
Right here.
It's almost done, so hopefully
we'll be able to post that later this week.
Andrew Song says,
"IPA beer can lead to moobs Google it now."
IPA moobs.
What is a moob?
Oh, man boobs.
This is not good.
Please tell me this isn't a real life.
IPAs are my favorite beer.
Honestly, I don't even like any other types of beer anymore.
I love the hoppiness in the IPA,
which is weird because I used to hate hoppy flavors.
I would have like a sip of an IPA
and I'll be like, "Oh, this is disgusting.
"Why do people like this?"
And my friends were like, "Who, get you drunk faster."
I'd be like, (slurps)
and now I love them.
The hoppy ales contain (mumbles).
I'm not even going to act like I know how to pronounce that.
They can help you sleep at night
and can be of aid to women going through menopause.
However they also contribute to man boobs.
Thanks so much for ruining IPAs for me, Andrew.
I'm just going to go cry myself to sleep now.
I couldn't fall asleep,
so needed a pop one of these open.
I think man, boobs wouldn't look too bad on me.
I don't know.
I could rock man boobs.
(upbeat music)