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How to combine strobes and LED lights for captivating sports portraits

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Light painting can be a lot of fun, and it’s even more fun when you combine it with regular old flash to create dynamic and interesting images. Portraits, particularly of athletes or dancers can provide the perfect subject for experimenting with this technique as it appears to show movement in a still image, which is what sport and dance are all about really.

In the video below, photographer Bee Trofort shows us how she captured these intriguing images of an athlete using a combination of Spiffy Gear’s innovative wrist wrap light bracelets, the KYU-6.

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Holiday Gift Guide – Best Flash and Video Lights of 2021

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The season of giving is upon us – which becomes immediately obvious whenever you walk into a store and you’re overwhelmed by Whamageddon. If you want to avoid the Christmas music and prefer to do your shopping online, then have no fear, DIYP’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guides are here to rescue you with some of our favourite new releases of the year, as well as a few old favourites that always seem to find a place in our gear bags.

In this post, we’re going to be taking a look at lighting, but keep an eye out for upcoming guides featuring Tripods, Sliders & Gimbals, and other accessories and gadgets and be sure to check out our previous guide going over the best of this year’s new Cameras and lenses.

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The best vloggig rig – its quite unorthodox

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I’ve only recently gotten into vlogging with my new YouTube channel, and I’m far more used to being in front of someone else’s camera for videos so this is a new world for me. I’ve played around and done a lot of research to figure out the ideal vlogging rig, and I think I’ve managed to create it.

Let’s start by defining what makes the ideal vlogging rig. It’s important to have a capable camera with a preview screen that can face the content creator (that would be me). Perhaps more important than the camera is the audio – we will watch bad video, but we won’t listen to bad audio! Next up, lighting. In low light conditions, we need to add our own light, and we should be able to match the colour temperature of the ambient light. Finally, a good, sturdy base for when we put the camera down and something ergonomic to hold onto. So, here’s my solution: –

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Check out these eight 3D printed photo & video tools designed to make your life a little easier

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I put off getting a 3D printer for the longest time. I didn’t want to get one just for the sake of having a new toy that I’d get bored with, so I held off getting one until I felt I had a genuine need for one. Now, I have five – the most recent of which are the Snapmaker 2.0 A350 and its predecessor, the Snapmaker Original, and I find them absolutely invaluable.

I’ve been using them recently to print a bunch of tools and accessories to help me with my photography and filmmaking. Some of them are workflow and organisation accessories while others are actual tools used to create content. So, here, I’m going to talk about some of the most useful things I’ve printed lately.

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2020 DIYP Holiday Gift Guide – Lighting

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Light is something that plagues us all, whether we’re photographers or filmmakers. There’s either never enough, or it’s coming from the wrong direction, or it’s too hard or soft for what we need. So, we often need to add our own to get that look that we really want. So, with cameras and lenses out of the way, that’s what we’re going to be covering in our lighting gift guide.

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Watch and learn how light paint your product photography with LED lights and strobes

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Product photography can be a lot of fun, especially when you start to experiment with light painting. In this video, photographer Mark Duffy shows us how he does his long exposure product photography using the new KYU 6 LED lights and Godox MS300 strobes in the studio on a pair of trainers (or “sneakers”, for those of you in the US).

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Spiffy Gear launches their second-generation KYU-6 wearable cine-light

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The popular wearable Lumiee LED lights have received an upgrade. Spiffy Gear has today announced its successor, the KYU-6. Like the original Lumiee, it comes in 95+ CRI bi-colour and clean wavelength RGB flavours, but KYU-6 comes with finer brightness settings, better weather resistance, and you can now charge it while using it.

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How I shot the Gnarbox getting loaded in the speed of light

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I wanted to shoot a conceptual photo using long exposure to show the SD card flying out of my camera and into the Gnarbox*. I used the cool Spiffy Gear Lumee RGB light to achieve this.

Here is a quick breakthrough on how the show was made including the BTS, lighting, and gear used.

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Watch this crazy video combining fire, water, capoeira and slow motion

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Slow-motion video is a lot of fun to shoot. I’ve been playing around with it myself a bit since recently receiving the Insta360 ONE R, which is capable of shooting up to 200fps. It can be tricky, though. You need subjects that benefit from being slowed right down for a start. And if you’re using artificial lights, you need ones that are flicker-free at the fast shutter speeds required for high frame rates.

Filmmaker Edden Ram recently teamed up with the folks at Spiffy Gear to overcome both of these challenges, bringing skateboarders, capoeira and fire dancers and more together to bring water, light and motion together for a pretty awesome final result.

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