Gear: Light Blaster

Light Blaster

So this time I would like to write about a piece that is an important part of my bag recently, it is the Light Blaster! What is it doing? Basically you need a strobe and a lens and it turns into a projector. But unlike a normal projector it is using the strobe power so it is quite powerful! The strobe is tightly fixed on the back side of the Light Blaster, and the lens is mounted on the front side! If you use Canon lenses you can mount them the way they are, and for Nikon lenses you might need some adapter! You don’t really need that quality lens for the projector part, but I would suggest you to use as bright lens as you can! I personally prefer something like aperture f/1.4, which compared to the lens on this image for example (Canon 17-40 F/4) is giving you the advantage of 3 stops of light! Here are a few different articles of shots where I am using the Light Blaster, check them out for more details:

Light Blaster related articles / ブラスター使った記事一覧

All 3 /Light Blaster 3

Shooting it: Using Light Blaster for Flower & Body Art Shoot

This time I will be uploading a series of 3 articles This is the last set from that day, I will be using the Light Blaster to create my backgrounds here! Check out the 3 articles too!

Shooting it: Haunted Tunnel (Light Blaster)

I’ve really been having lots of fun with the Light Blaster recently! Here is another series of photos taken using it for background modifier! Last month I had some really big strobist

Shooting it: Light Blaster for the Background

In this article you can see some new interesting way to modify your backgrounds, using the Light Blaster! It is a tool that can torn your strobes into a projector to make interesting stuff!

There are many slides that you can purchase together with the Light Blaster, and some of them are really cool! Of course you can get creative and create your own slides! Also you can use the 35mm film slides of you have any! The series with metal slides is really cool, and I personally quite often use this pattern bellow! 

You could use any Canon mount lens, or Nikon lens if you get an adapter for it! The brighter the lens the better, probably the cheapest very usable lens you could get is the Canon 50mm F/1.8 glass! So,here is my choice of lens usually –  Canon 24mm F/1.4 vs. Canon 17-40mm F/4, It could be tricky, which one to put on the camera and which one on the Blaster when shooting with wide angle, and you need to think about it carefully! Let me start from the back, to make it easy to understand, I needed ISO-1600 here to expose properly the tunnel with having the Nissin MG8000 strobe at full power 1/1, and the Canon 24 F/1.4 lens set on it! Then on the camera body I had the F/4 lens. Could I do it the other way? Sure, i could set the F/4 lens on the Blaster, and lose 3 stops overall on the background light, and get them back using the F/1.4 lens on the camera body, which would let around 3 stops of available light (if there is any) to influence your photo! This photo of a big tunnel is a good example for what I am talking about! 

Well, it is your choice which one you should do, but generally I would prefer using the brighter lens on the Blaster!  So for the strobe at the blaster I do have also a battery pack, and for it was really good to have it since it was at 1/1 power and I wanted it to charge quickly! Well to be honest in most cases when I’m using the blaster from the beginning I set my strobe at Full power and usually I adjust everything else after that! 

ライト・ブラスター

ライト・ブラスターはかなり面白い機材ですよ！それを使えば、あんまり面白くない背景でもプロジェクター使ってるみたいに、自分の好きな背景作れます！この写真もライトブラスターで背景をいじっています！上記の写真にブラスター自体が写っています！ストロボとレンズをつけて、そしてもともとついてるスライドなどを使うと背景を何でも変えれます！手で持ってるのがこの撮影のメインのフォトに使ったスライドです！日本にもライト・ブラスターを取り扱ってるお店がひとつあるので、ぜひご確認ください: OMNIVAS | 機材屋オムニバス ← 名前を押していただいたら、ブラスターのページに飛びますね！ ブラスターを使うときはキャノンのレンズが必要になります、ブラスターはキャノンマウントなのです！レンズが明るいほど、光が強くなるので、短焦点レンズがお勧めですね！私の場合24mmの1.4レンズをよくつけます！そして、だいたい使うときはストロボはフル発光のときが多いです！ストロボは1/1パワーに設定してるので、だいたいバッテリーパックも使っています！

Some photos with the Light Blaster / ブラスター使った写真

In the end here are a few examples of photos where I am using the Light Blaster

In the end

Now, I am preparing a series of new articles on some general topics, let me know which one of them you want to see first, so I get it ready earlier! Also other ideas are welcome too! Here are some of them: Portraits at night / Lens article (I guess 135/2) / Portraits in the rain / Use of gels / Using backlight / One light setups / Shoots with just one umbrella / General shooting portraits / Can cheap lenses make good photos / Swing the camera shots / Using snoots / Shaped bokeh / … or any other idea welcome, post it in the comments, and I will see if I am able to write about it! Also stay tuned for my new blog section starting soon called “Strobist Diary” There I will talk about many of my off-camera flash techniques from basic things to some advanced stuff! 

Comments

comments