Brita and Meverly

Brita and Meverly

I had a thought in mind, and thankfully Meverly and Brita were willing to go along with it.

I have a wand light: Neewer CL124 specifically. And I have it mounted to a monopod with a tripod base for standing it upright. So the idea was to use the wand light as the light for taking shots of these two with the sunset fading fast behind them.

The inspiration for this came from night shots I took of Anna back in April, when I had her illuminated by the headlights from her mother's car. I've taken plenty of sunset shots using my speedlight, but wanted to see what a continuous light could do.

My conclusion overall: one wand light isn't all that great. It doesn't get nearly as bright as would be ideal, so it needs to be close to the subject. And that ends up creating some hard shadows. Two would be better with some kind of diffusion medium in front of them. (And I just happen to have a second one.)

I also have a variable-temperature studio light - Godox SL100Bi - that I can power from a Milwaukee Top Off without issue and is easily going to be much brighter. It just requires either a shoot-through umbrella - which is better for portability - or a softbox to diffuse the light to avoid the hard shadows.