Hello I'm Graham and I hope everyone's having a great day and welcome to this
video in which I'm going to show you some ways of enhancing your flash
photography especially if you're going to be using speed lights in your home
studio. Now you're probably aware if you want to use a speed light you've got to
set it up on some sort of tripod or on a traditional light stand the normal
method is to use the supplied hot you foot that you clip the flash to and then
normally in the shoe there is a quarter 20 threaded hole luckily if you find one
with a brass insert rather than just ordinary plastic threads otherwise they
strip out far too easy so you can put those on a quick release plate and fit
that to your your tripod and you then can set up the flash of the angle you
want for your particular shot if you've got light stands and obviously you can
use a light stand adapter turntable you to fit the hot shoe complete with a
radio trigger if you need to answer the hot shoe now in terms of light modifiers
and that's really the reason I wanted to show this video today is you're fairly
limited by the amount of modification you can do to the light that comes from
Lees now normally you've got just these softbox a diffuser it's normally
supplied when these flash units and that gives you a little bit of softening to
get rid of the very harsh shadows that you se you see from these flash units
you can increase that by use of these little clip-on diffusers I've got four
of these and unfortunately all of them they've lost the little tabs around the
outside edge that you fit these to the side of the flash unit these when they
do work give you a slightly larger diffused area and gives you a softer
output but beyond that you are fairly limited you might be able to use colored
gels so if you wanted to use colored gels to enhance your photography you
could clip on a colored gel to it and the other option is by the use of these
grids the honeycomb grid's which allow you to concentrate the light
in two straight beams have you wanted to get hard-edged two images now if you
wanted softer shadow still you've got to be using an umbrella
either the shoot-through type the Nylund translucent or the reflective silver or
gold type umbrella and that allows you to create softer shadows because you're
given a larger area and if you are going to use that method then you obviously
need an adapter which allows you to fit the umbrella to the flash stand so here
is an adapter that goes on a clash stand it's got a hole in there and the shaft
of the umbrella it just slips through there that allows you to set the
umbrella to the angle you want and the flash fires into the umbrella normally
you'd flip this wide-angle panel down there to give more of a diffused light
into the umbrella to give that wider flash bread so that's the option if
you're going to use speed lights either on your tripod or on a flash stand but
it is about the limit of the amount of creativity you can get with the flash
units for the last six weeks I saw it I've been experimenting by using a new
bracket assembly which allows me to use the boys lighting adapters for flash so
I'll quickly change over and you can see what I mean now this is the particular
lighting clamp that I've been using this one is a one by newer and I'll put a
link to that in the video description below but on Amazon and eBay there are
several of these made by different types of manufactures but they all provide the
same functionality of giving you the bayonet fit to use boring light fittings
now normally these would fit to a light stun but you can get these little
adapters which have got 1/4 20 threaded hole in the bottom and you can mount
that onto your quick release plate for your tripod and then this would go on
there and fit like so so you could actually use these on a tripod rather
than the light stand but normally these would fit to a light stand you just clip
over the fitting on the light stand and the flash unit is held in place by a
clamp on the unit so you would just fit the head into the assembly comp it in
place and now you've got a convenient method
but holding that flash unit and then again you've got the
ability to position the the head and to whatever angle you want for your
particular shot the beauty of this system is in the fact that we've got
this boyens adapter and it allows you to use that as a range of boings lights
modifiers here's a sudden each dish which just
will bayonet into that fitting and a quick turn it latches in and to release
it there's a little lever on the side which allows you to deal a chit so here
we've got the first set of light modifier which gives you a fairly
concentrated beam you can get much larger beauty dishes I've got a 24-inch
beauty dish which is the back of the studio there but the game that would fit
onto this boyens adapter you can use again the honeycombs and again they're
available in different angles and this one is the 60 degrees so this would clip
into that light fitting like so and give you a more defying light pattern the
light would be streamed out at 6 degrees and give you a more concentrated beam if
you wanted softer shadows then you could use a supplied nylon diffuser and again
that just fits around the rim of the light like so and that would give you a
larger area and is a softer shadows but if you wanted really soft shadows then
you would use either a larger dish with a built-in reflector or you can use
something like this large 24-inch softbox now this one's my god ox but
there are different types available this one actually folds up and you can see
we've got an inner diffuser and can actually fit the diffuser to the outside
so you can get double diffusion but it really depends on the power of your
Flash goodness - how much diffusion you will get power you'll get on the output
so none of these are designed for a studio flash so 600 watt second flash
but you can get a suitable effect with the guns with a guide number of
something like 60 which will give you an adequate out but and again this you just
clips over the rim of the light fitting and then you get a softbox
like so and that gives you a nice soft shadows particularly if you keep it
close to your subject there's a whole range of light modifiers are available
in this type of fitting or can you use even the interface range with the
suitable interface bonds adapter which you can buy on Amazon and then you can
use these to expand your your Flash and again with this particular fitting it's
got a hole and a clamp so you can actually fit your umbrella into the
units and and lock that in place and you can then direct the flash into the
umbrella to give you some softer shadows on your subject now the clamps are both
covered in rubber so you're not going to damage your flash unit when you clamp
this down it will even take flash units I've got the old vivitar 283 it won't
actually fit through from the front because of the size of the flush
modifier on there but you can feed it through from the front and it will go
through and give you that higher intensity to that 283 has obviously
you've got to trigger your flush unit either by optical trigger or you can use
radio triggers or with this godox X system it can be fired directly from
the transmitter on the camera so you've got many options you can use with these
units so there we go that's the newer s type bracket or the borns like that's in
adapter I think that is in the video description below so thanks very much
for watching please do take care and I hope to see you all in my next video
and good bye for now