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LEDs vs Strobes

Lesson 20 from: SLR Lounge Live Q and A and Image Critique

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

20. LEDs vs Strobes

Lesson Info

LEDs vs Strobes

What do you think about L E DS? As compared to strobes? They're great. Actually, that's a really good question. So let me go ahead and bust out some different ladies, okay? This is a local jail one. We grab this guy and let me grab this guy the ice light. OK? Every one of these tools has a purpose, and it's gonna be great in certain situations and not so much. And others. For example. Right now, this is on its brightest setting. This is on its brightest setting. Okay, you don't see any of this. Like like I couldn't move this around. Nothing on that wall. Right? You see a little bit of this guy. That's it. So this has throw. But compare this now. Of the two lights, this is obviously the most powerful one of these two, right? In terms of its throw, uh, can we do that a different direction so we can see? I don't know. Let's do it here against the wall here. Okay. Is that Does that work better? Awesome. Okay, so right there, Right. We can see this. And let me just show these two again. So ...

this you can barely see? Correct If I bring it close. Yes, I can light something, but this is design is a soft light. It's designed to light for portraiture. So if I was a comp to Xena and let's say that my natural light is coming from this side, I use this just to boost it up a little bit. So watch I can bring it in and just boost the natural light a little bit. And it has a beautiful natural look soft wrapping. Great. This not so much has ah, Hollywood spotlight. Look right, two very different looks, but this is a little more powerful. This guy has to be close to be used. This high has throw. How does this have throw over the final thing? This is the built infernal zoom so we can open it or close it. And this is how the final works in the flash to the more light that you beam to a place Essentially, the more power that you're getting right? This didn't get a more powerful just we're putting more light on that spot. But now compare this guy, and even just for the split second, you're gonna see this flash to this, okay? I mean, this is putting out 2030 40 times the amount of light, but is doing it for just a split second, right? Probably not that much. More like 10 stuff. I don't know. I say that because someone gonna call me out. Well, technically, pie, it's only like six stops. I know it's a lot more. Okay, So what I think about Strober is led. They all have their purposes, and they all have their places. If you're outdoors in daytime, you're gonna need this guy and maybe even you need to step up to something a little bit bigger. Let's bust out this guy. This is so much fun. I like playing with here. Okay, This is a proposal. Be too. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and put this into roughly the same spot. So this is full power. This is full power. Okay, so this guy is putting off 280 watts. If you're to measure this guy in the same setting, this is about 50. So you're getting five times the amount of power. Could you get this much light out of these? Yes, but you need to stack them. You need 3 to 4. These to do the same thing. So in daytime situations, if we want to do direct flash, one of these guys is okay. If we want to do flash with modification, we need one of these guys because we're losing too much light. When you open up a light source, what happens? That light is you guys can see it actually far to grab this. Where's my up? Right there. Let's bring us a little bit closer to the wall. Pretty bright. Right? But as soon as we defuse that light, do you see how much light we lose in that diffusion process? Okay, the closer I go to the wall, them or the light you can see you see that? So if you want to put light through, let me see. Let me do that again. Real quick underside. So diffusion kills your light that visible there ago. So what that means is during the day, if we wanted to fuse Flash, we need 250 to 500 watt seconds of power. You need a B one or B two or something equivalent. They make you know there's a lot of other brands stuff I talk a lot about flashes in the light qualities because they're different. Um, lights are not made equally. Everybody thinks this, for example, this guy 500 bucks kind of expensive right might not be the first tool that you going invest in because it's a great tool. But it has certain there's limited its functionality, but what it does, it does really well. So it's one those things that you put your money into when you have some money to spend. You want to make your life easier. Until then, you use a pocket flash. But people go, Hey, I can get this guy for 100 bucks if I go get the knock off version of it or they go. Hey, Instead of spending two grand on a pro photo, I could go get the Chinese versions for 500 bucks, because you can do that. If you want to spend your money there, that's totally fine. What you need to realize is that you're not getting the same thing. They measure these lights this light for consistency in color output, temperature output and so forth. This Sorry, is this really bright? I see that everybody like kind of just want to mess with you now, Okay? So when you buy a inexpensive version, when these lights, it'll look the same until you shoot with it. And then you find out that the lights green and you're not seeing good color on skin tone. You're not seeing those kind of things because that's what that's what makes something expensive. When you get the inexpensive versions of a big strobe, Did you guys know that you actually flashed as this? This is kind of a fun thing to understand. We're going to say this is temperature variance. Okay, These air inexpensive Chinese made strobes 101 101 101 100 from shot to shot. Especially when the battery starts dropping, your images are actually gonna get more warm, less warm or warm. Less form. You're gonna have variances in temperature output across the way. Now, this is maybe a higher end, like something nicer, like something decent that you might get, and it's gonna plus 20 minus 20 plus 20 minus 20 across the board. Right. Something like a pro photo is designed for minus one plus one plus one minus one. They're designed for virtually no variance in temperature. So what you're paying for is the R and D to get to that point. Basically, Now, that doesn't mean you don't buy the inexpensive stuff. What it means is that I bought a lot of inexpensive stuff. What ends up happening is it breaks. It will eventually need to be replaced with something that is more consistent because it causes me more work on the post side. Right, if I have. If I'm doing a commercial gig where I need consistent colors throughout every single image, I could shoot it with this flash. That's fine. But in every single image, I'm gonna have to go into post and just make sure that every single thing is lined up inaccurate. If I'm delivering several images, that makes it very difficult to do. Okay, so that's kind of what remembrance I usually say when it comes to gear, if you can. If you can hold off a little bit, use what you have and in anything in your camera, in your lenses, in your lighting, save up to the point where you can invest in something quality. That way, you're actually using it for a long period, of time and actually doesn't make your life better. As opposed to like being something that Oh, this will work for the next six months. And I got to get rid of and get something else. Cool question. Uh, for consistency sakes, Is it the same thing with pocket strobes? By that? I mean, if you have canon by cannon, if you have photo ticks by faux ticks or can you mix and match, you can mix him out here. Let's say young, you know, But I don't know if I pronounce that right. So, yeah, you're not going to see as big of a variance in pocket strobes? I do like faux Tex is in terms of like, a full feature, Strobe that a full picture pocket strobe that is a little bit less expensive. Um, they're great. What you will see, though, has seen the way of flash pulses. If I were to draw it out, Flash looks like this. OK, so this is no light. What happens is the reason why a flash does. What it can do is because if you imagine a regular light like that guy, right, all it's doing is putting out a consistent level of light nonstop. That's it. What a flash is doing is it's saving up its energy. So is putting out no light until you tell it to. And then what it does is it takes the energy that stores and its little juicy sells their juicy and it ramps it up and it peaks. And when it peaks, you hear the pulse, right? You can actually, like, literally hear it on something like a B two. So this is actually charged already so you can actually hear the pop when you hear it. And then it goes through that ramping cycle again, where it saves up its juice and then you pop it off. This process is where things go wonky. Now, the more power that you're putting into this, the more likelihood there's gonna be variances in temperature and power and so forth. So when you this is rated to recycle at full power, like every 1.5 seconds, OK, so 280 watts every 1.5 seconds and you have full power no variants, even down to its one bar right now. So a good battery will maintain its performance all the way through the end of its life. Its power. A bad battery is when you start seeing issues like inexpensive batteries, you start get 50% lots of variants in these things. So your flash outputs now pocket strobes. A lot of people love to use pocket strobes in studio work because they have a great power to freeze. You guys know that if I were to measure this out this to this, if you're to measure its out in a period of time, it's not instantaneous. We think of it is instantaneous, but it's not. We think of it that way because when you look at it, you're like that actually happened instantly. In reality, it just happened very quickly for a stroke like this to ramp up, shoot off and into end at full power. I don't know. It's gonna be around 1 to 1 1000 of a setting of Ah, second, which means if you're trying to freeze motion and you're trying to strobe it, that's why they have things like high speed sink now, so that when you're shooting at thousands that you can stay at 1 2000 seconds. Still, add flash power to the frame, right? It's to keep the speed up when you go and buy inexpensive strip. I saw a strobe on eBay. It was a pocket strove is that I think, like 50 bucks at any power setting. It fired at 1 to 50. They're setting. There is a website that didn't like all these different tests on them. And when you actually in general, what happens with the flashes when you dial down the power like fire to pull us down? That flash duration is now maybe 1 10/1000 of a second. It's incredibly quick at these low power settings. What those flashes would happen was when you down down the flash and you're supposed to get a faster response, you actually got a slower response, which means that if you're on a dance floor shooting a reception with this flash, it's not gonna freeze your subjects. And it's a really, really bad flash. So again, I think with a you know what they're going to good in terms of that kind of stuff. You go to that $100 mark, you're gonna get something decent. You might have reliability issues over time, which I have had, but sometimes that can be worth the trade off. If literally, you have 100 bucks or 200 bucks and you to jump into a system to start learning. Maybe that's the trade off that you make knowing that down the road I will need to get something a little better. My question was more mixing and matching. If you're if you're doing anything, I completely missed the mark like you started out on the right, but they kind of did the pie tangent. But that's okay, that's cool. If you're doing a shoot and you have not too big of a deal in terms of like if it's decent pockets tropes a decent I think that's what I want to go with this. If you have some of these cheap $2050 guys mixed in there, that's a really, really bad. But if you're somewhere in the range of like 153 $100 for each one, you're not gonna see too much of a difference. But I do like there's nothing to consider when you're when you're mixing and matching. I like all of my things to be a one brand because I should professionally and when something goes wrong, I don't want to go to four different places to be getting service. So as much as I can stick toe one brand, the better off you are in terms of the service and simplicity of getting things back and repaired.

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Pye is an awesome instructor! He explains everything in a way that you understand it. He is a wealth of information. Love all of his classes!! I love Creativelive and SLR Lounge! Continue doing the great work that you do!!

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Pye is an amazing teacher! I've learned so much from him over the years - both in person and through his tutorials. What's even more amazing is that he is able to do it LIVE! He is able to clearly explain complicated concepts through easy to understand lessons. I highly recommend his courses to learn everything from the basics to advanced topics!

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Wow! Pye is an awesome instructor! I've learned SO many things - nuggets of gold!

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