Since the publication of my first book,  Minimalist Lighting: Professional Technique for Location Photography, back in May of 2008, I've been asked from time to time to review products that people think may be useful to photographers working with small flashes.  If they are yet another variation of the small, on camera fill card I usually decline.  But every once in a while you get some really interesting things to test out.

I agreed to test out some stuff from  a company called Speedlight Prokit.  And the reason I found them a little bit compelling is that all of their lighting modifiers come flat.  It's like getting a kit that you can play with and put together but from a practical standpoint you can also quickly disassemble the stuff and pack it down tiny in most camera bags and wheeled cases.

All the Speedlight Pro Kit stuff I'sve played with so far is made out of a dense, flexible plastic and uses button snaps to hold parts of the panels and what not together.  When all the stuff first arrived I was skeptical but there were two things in particular I could use all the time so I diligently put them together.

The first is the small softbox.

Please Log In or Sign Up for a FREE Silver Account to access the rest of this article or others on ProPhotoResource.comWhen you open the back you essentially see a bunch of plastic, two velcro straps and some thinner, white plastic.  If you take the time to read the instructions you can start snapping stuff together to build a small, six inch by eight inch softbox.

Here are the main parts for the softbox.  Not shown is the double layered, white diffusion panel that snaps onto the front.

Once I read the instruction putting the whole thing together was a snap.  The interior is a very bright silver finish for good efficiency and it is complete with a pebble texture to keep from hot spotting.

Given the small size of the box it's easy to travel with and once you built it one time you won'st have any problem tearing it down or rebuilding it in thirty seconds or so.

The front diffuser is relatively close to the front of a properly positioned battery powered flash so the manufacturers have wisely added the option of putting in a diffusion dome to spread out the light.  The internate baffle/diffusion dome, couple with the double layers of white, translucent plastic on the front gives a very soft and even light given the size of the modifier.

On my Olympus fl50R flash the additional weight of the softbox is negligible.  It is attached by putting the two flaps with sticky, little rubber nubs against the body of the flash and then wrapping a velcro strap tightly around them to keep the whole assemblage in place.

Once you've got it all together and you'sve figured out where the sticky nubbies go and how to tighten everything onto your flash like you should you'll end up with something that looks like this:

So how well does the box work?  Well, if you are using it for event photography, where you'll be walking around a room photographing people and using your flash in the TTL mode you'll find that, used close (within five feet) it gives a softer light than that which you would get from a white plastic diffuser that just fits over the business end of the flash.  As you get farther away the effect is lessened. I find all accesories in this size range too small for the kind of portrait photography I do at any distance.  In event work it's nice to have the hard edges of bare flash taken down and softened a bit.  It's a good compromise between a cumbersome, small umbrella and a much smaller light panel.

But the place I get the most use out of this version of the soft box is in doing portrait work out on location.  Not as the main light but as the background light in an two or three light set up.  Here's why.  I usually use the backlight fairly close to my background (within four or five feet.) because I light the light to fall off pretty quickly as it spreads to the edges of the backdrop.  Used in this way it is easier to get a nice halo effect with portraits.

When the light is used this close my big problem becomes turning the light down far enough to balance with an exposure of f5.6 or wider for my main light on the subject.  I really like the wide apertures and more narrow DOF.  It's especially important for people who are using 4:3 sensor cameras with their larger, built in depth of field, like me..

I typically use the Speedlight Pro Kit softbox with a Vivitar 383df flash for two reasons.  The 383df has a power ratio control that goes down to 1/16th power and it has a built in optical slave which means I have to carry around one les radio trigger.  At 1/16th or 1/8th power recycling is rarely an isue. 

When my shoot is over and I'sm packing up it's really just a matter of popping a few snaps, straightening out the plastic and dropping the parts into the front pocket of my Airport Security roller case.

Here's what the small softbox looks like in practice, shooting a test against a gray, studio wall.

An interesting accessory for the softbox is a grid attachment that takes the place of the front diffusion panel.  This collimates the light to form a tight circle of light with a soft transfer at the edges.  It's a wonderful accessory when you want tight control over where you put the light and how big a footprint the light creates.

And heres's a test sample of how the grid functions in real life

Here's what the two variations look like sitting around in my studio waiting to be put into the game: 

There are a lot more parts and pieces to the Speedlight Pro Kit story and I'll cover a few more favorites (like a collapsible, portable beauty dish ) next month.  But before I move on I want to talk about an accessory that they make which is very sensible and very worthwhile---even though it seems like an after thought.  What I'm talking about is a neat little grid spot attachment that just fits nicely over the working end of a flash.

It's hard to screw up with this but I do want to mention one thing.  This accessory is held together with double stick tape and, no doubt, in the studio it won't give you many problems.  But I live in Texas and I started playing with this stuff back in August when it got as high as 107 degrees (f).  If I left one of the grids in the car I came back to typically find it deconstructed.  Now I wrap a piece of gaffer's tape around the exterior just make sure it isn't going anywhere.

But the proof isn't in the pudding, it's in the tasting of the pudding and here's what the little grid boxes do well:

When you need a controlled spot of light these things come in very handy.  If find myself using them all the time.  If you have a flash that has a modeling light feature (a series of high speed pulses that, along with your persistence of vision, give you a nearly constant light source to compose with) that's an advantage because you can position the lights and grid precisely without having to do iterative tests.

This company has a lot of interesting products that go with the softboxes and the smaller grids.  There is a very small (12 inch) octalight which gives a softer light than the softbox (but not by much).  There are barndoors attachments for the softboxes and even filter sets.  I mentioned a collapsible beauty dish up above and there is even a novel competitor to the Gary Fong Tupperware stuff that's made for wedding and event work.  I'sll get to all of these in the next month's review.

But here's were the whole notion of small accessories fits in for me.  I like big, soft lights that I can get less specular highlights and lots of  great mid tone and wonderfully soft transitions from the diffuse (accurately exposed skin areas) to the shadow areas.  And I want those shadow areas to have an open feeling as well.  This is resolutely the province of large diffusers.  And when I say large I mean white silk panels in the range of six feet by six feet up to twelve feet by twelve feet.  None of these little panels are going to take the place of that kind of equipment.  So I wouldn't make these my first purchase.  But I would add the grids and the small softbox to my toolkit for location work that requires secondary lights.  I would also use the softboxes to modify my off camera flashes for event work.  The tests I've done convince me that the internal diffuser and the double layered front panel make a subtle but real difference when working in close.

There are two real benefits to working with these innovative light modifiers:  1.  They are easier to pack than just about anything I've used.  Unlike round accessories they pack down flat and are quick and easy to set up.  2.  Even though they are small and light they've been well designed and have a range of sub modifiers (light barndoors and honeycomb grid front panels) that give you a lot of control over the quality and spill of your light.  As I'll tell you in more detail next month, I've never enjoyed taking a traditional, hard beauty dish on location because they don't fit in any case I own and take up tons of space.  The new beauty dish from Speedlight Pro Kit is easy to set up, way easy to pack, and gives me a light source that, while not the same as a real parabolic with a non linear curved reflector, is very much in the ball park.  My only complaint is that they should have a connection kit so I can use this handy accessory with my Profoto 600b heads or the Elinchrome Ranger heads as this would expand the choices available in the portable world.

Now, on to something a bit different.

Here's a photo of Mimi that I took while doing a lighting workshop in Austin, Texas.  I won't win any awards from the PPofA but that's beside the point.

This portrait was the end result of a build up we did using one light to take the place of four different lights!  It's a trick that can be done when shooting with reflector panels and it's one that you'sll want to remember when you want a traditional portrait look but only have one wimpy little battery powered strobe on hand.

I've made some drawings to illustrate where everything is and how the set up works.

These drawings are very much NOT accurate as far as relative distances are concerned to give more credence to what I write than what I draw...

We started with a straightforward set up.  Camera at the bottom, model in the middle and background about 15 feet in the distance.

I place a flash set to a wide angle of zoom dispersion over to the right of the model and about 45 degrees from the camera position.  I also bring in a diffuser panel and place it at a 45 degree angle to my model.  I place the panel about two feet from Mimi for maximum softnes.  What I get is a well exposed area on one side of her face.

It's important to note that I'sve place the light far enough from the diffuser panel so that light spills around both the front and the rear of the panel.  The raw light spilling behind the panel strikes the background paper and provides a background light source.  While the panel eats up two stops of light in the diffusion and balances the exposure on Mimi with the exposure on the background.  That's two lights!

Since the flash is a good ten or fifteen feet away from the diffusion panel there is ample light going past the panel behind which allows me to add a bright silver reflector from opposite side of the main light.   This silver reflector is highly efficient and takes some of the direct light that moves post the back of the diffuser and bounces it back in toward the subject as hair light.  Raising or lowering the reflector will allow you to position the hair light exactly.

Our final addition is a big white reflector panel which captures the raw light coming past the front of the diffusion panel and lets us create a nice, soft fill on the side of Mimi's face opposite the main light.

We could have continued with the exercise by bringing in a shiny reflector on the main light side of the background to put even more hair light in the scene and we could have positioned another passive reflector under Mimi's chin but I felt that showing one light doing the work of four was enough for one day.

One of the class members came up after the demo to thank me.  He said,  I always thought I'd need four or five lights to do a portrait.  Now I know I just need to engage my brain.  Yep.  More is not always better.

That's about it for November. 

Note:  The Commercial Photography Handbook is racking up some really great reviews over at Amazon.com.  I'm especially proud of three new reviews.  One is from a photo educator at one of the biggest two year college photo programs in the country.  He is considering the book for his classes.  Two others are from famous photographers, Michael O'sBrien and Will Van Overbeek.

Micheal's shot for Life and many times for National Geographic Magazine.  Will is a fine arts photographer and a sought after advertising pro.  Please read their reviews and consider adding your own review to theirs.

It's a book that will help photographers at every level to fine tune their businesses, get their marketing into shape and figure out how to make some money at this tough, fun game.

Happy Fall.

© Kirk Tuck