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Here are 17 quick and easy off-camera lighting recipes to up your flash game

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If you want to learn more about lighting setups, here is a fantastic, comprehensive and above all fun video to help you learn. MagMod shares Trevor Dayley‘s class at WPPI 2018 where he teaches as many as 17 different lighting setups.

This video isn’t just useful for those who learn more about flash photography. Trevor is also a fantastic speaker and he shares a rather crazy memorization story to help you remember these lighting recipes. You’ll have fun watching this video and definitely learn some setups that will help you improve your photography.

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A hands-on first look at the Cactus RQ250 lithium ion 250Ws portable strobe

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Cactus has remained quite a small player in the flash scene since Godox came along with their powerful and portable lithium-ion powered strobes. But, small as they may be, they are a mighty force. They have the widest cross-platform compatibility of any brand out there and have become a favourite of Pentax and Sigma shooters the world over.

But Cactus has always had one big problem. They only make speedlights. Well, that’s changed now, with the announcement of the RQ250 battery powered portable strobe. It’s 250Ws and on paper, it seems to compete very well with its direct Godox AD200 competitor. We got to check out a prototype at The Photography Show recently, and have a little chat about its future.

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Elinchrom launches the ELB 500 TTL – Their most powerful portable TTL strobe ever

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TTL seems to have become all the rage for big strobes the last few years. There are now TTL strobe options from Godox, Profoto and even Cactus, amongst others. Now Elinchrom up their game with the new ELB 500 TTL; A 500Ws pack & head system offering TTL, High Speed Sync all the way up to 1/8000sec, and 400 full power flashes on a single charge for use both on location and in the studio.

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How colour contamination may be ruining your photographs and how to fix it

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Whether you’re aware of the correct terminology or not, you have likely experienced this colour contamination happening in your photographs already.

Put simply, colour contamination is when one colour is affected by the presence of another colour in close proximity. So for example, if you’re photographing two friends side by side, one of them is wearing a white t-shirt and the other one is wearing a red t-shirt, the white t-shirt will likely take on a pinkish tone due to the fact that it’s receiving bounced light from the red t-shirt close by.

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Experiments shooting studio portraits with a wide angle lens

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Normally, in portrait photography, using wide-angle lenses is not a common choice for most photographers. Each focal length has its own characteristics, wider lenses are known by their unflattering distortion, seen mainly at the edge of a photograph. Landscape and architectural photographers are more used to it because their need of getting more information inside the frame, but even these scenarios it is not an easy trick, it does present challenges inherent of wide-angle lenses.

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Cactus announces new RQ250Ws compact bare bulb wireless strobe with TTL & High Speed Sync

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Well, it looks like the portable flash game just got a little more interesting. After a year’s worth of apparent Godox AD200 dominance, Cactus has now announced a seemingly viable competitor. The Cactus RQ250 is a 250Ws portable bare bulb strobe offering TTL, high speed sync and it fits in the palm of your hand. It also has a built-in receiver compatible with the Cactus V6II and V6IIs trigger systems.

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The beginner’s guide to using grids with softboxes

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Every day I see people posting in Facebook groups asking about softboxes and whether or not they should buy one with a grid. Personally, I always advise going for one that comes with a grid. Even if you don’t know why you might need it yet, if you get one without and then find out that you need one, it can often be impossible to source just the right size and shape.

But what exactly do grids do? And do you really need one? That’s what photographer David Bergman looks at in this two-minute video. He goes over what grids are for and when you might choose to use one. I have grids for all of my softboxes and octaboxes. I don’t always use them, but when I do need them, they’re absolutely invaluable.

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Use lighting gels to get a pastel light wrap around your subject

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Good news! This is actually a relatively easy JHP lighting setup to play with and it produces some pretty great looking results too. It’s easy to set up as you only need a couple of softboxes and this can be put together and shot in a very small space indeed; no studio required. Plus it produces some great looking results because it uses coloured light. Now I know I may sound biased on that but hear me out as we go through the setup and it should start to make more sense as to why this looks extra cool with coloured gels compared to without.

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See every Godox X system studio strobe in this side-by-side comparison

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People make a big deal about the AD600 (now AD600 Pro) and AD200 strobes when it comes to Godox. They offer a lot of power in a nice easily portable package. But they offer so many more strobes than just these two. While those mentioned above, along with the AD360II are fantastic for shooters looking to get light on location, there are quite a few photographers who never take their lights out of the studio.

And that’s where this handy video from Rob Hall comes in. It covers and compares the entire range of mains-powered Godox studio strobes compatible with the X1T, XT32 and XPro triggers. It’s a pretty extensive list of lights covering a range of requirements, and those on 220-240v power even see some flash duration perks that 110-120v countries do not.

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7 common studio portrait lighting mistakes and how you can avoid them

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We all make mistakes in photography. All of us. But these are things which help us learn and grow as photographers. We make mistakes, we figure out what went wrong, we correct it and then don’t make that mistake again. Thanks to the modern Internet, though, we can learn from the mistakes of others, too.

In this video, photography Antti Karppinen talks us through 7 of the most common lighting mistakes photographers make shooting portraits in the studio. But he’s also going to show us how we can avoid them, too.

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