Joe McNally: Small Lights, Big Garage

Been playing with the Lastolite Speed-lite 2 Plus Soft Box like a kid with a new toy. Fast, light and easily stuffable in a camera bag, for a little light shaper, it rocks. It’s got hefty edge baffles and a separate grid front to corral the light flow, and you generally don’t see those kids of controls on small softboxes. Very happy with it. Thankful to Lastolite that they made the design happen.

Over under combo works well as a good look for our talent, Elijah Gravely. He was terrific on set. 

And it has magnets inside, so you can easily affix the Lastolite gel holder, fitted with the gel set they offer, with gels cut to the size of the holder.

Handy, in a word. works well with an extendable boom to make a super mobile light source. A raw, gelled SB-500o in the background makes for a little bit of flare, and the upfront light is the Speedlite 2.

A good way to keep things pretty simple and direct.

It’s been fun, working with the folks at Lastolite, suggesting designs for light mods and shapers. And dreaming up some shoots for packaging, etc. Below is our friend Nik, who I shot on the streets of the Bronx a while ago, on the product packaging.

For the technically minded, both snaps were made on a D5, tethered to the computer with Tether Tools technology. Camera is perched on a heavy duty Gitzo, and the exposure is 1/640 @f1.8 with a Nikkor 24mm f1.4 lens. There’s a small number of SB-5000 units scattered about the garage, accenting different areas, but the heavy lifting is done by the two up front Speedlights, fitted with the Speedlite 2 boxes.

We did a couple of shoots that day, one of which Manfrotto launched a Facebook live adventure. A more fully developed video of the whole day, including the garage shoot, is still to come. Gotta offer big thanks to Andrew Tomasino, who runs Queen City Studio for getting all this together. Andrew is a fine photog, and Allentown is his neck of the woods.

Fun in the garage.