Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide: Day 24
Anyone who knows my family knows that we love to take pictures. With photographers on both sides of my family tree, I’ve seen {and owned} my share of gear throughout the years, especially during my years getting my fine arts degree in photography. While I now know how to properly illuminate a subject and how to use shadows and light to record the beauty I see around me, it’s just not always practical for me to perfectly light a subject each time I snap a picture.
Most of the time it’s a lack of portable equipment, but sometimes what limits me is a lack of space or time, or a subject that’s unwilling to wait while I illuminate it. And, sometimes it’s just pure laziness. With an active toddler and a little one almost always in my arms, I really don’t have the time or the patience to set up studio lighting – or to get them to demonstrate all of their adorableness in just the right spot for me to get that perfect picture.
While the summer months allow me to use the shadows and light of the sun for the natural photos I love, every year around this time I lament about the fact that my time for photographing is seriously limited – especially with the rainy and cold winters Seattle usually gives us. This rain and cold usually keeps us indoors most of the winter months, which is great since my wardrobe has very little gortex in it, but awful for my photography.
The result of these short days and damp weather is that I have a lot of pictures that are taken with the pop up flash on my camera, leaving the subject looking flat, over-exposed, red-eyed, and usually, surprised. I needed a solution that moved with me and allowed me to have makeshift studio light, but something I didn’t need to worry about someone knocking over. My solution is Professor Kobré’s Lightscoop® which has given me the ability to be spontaneous again.
While the Lightscoop isn’t a replacement for studio lighting and good old fashioned know-how, it is the easiest and simplest way to take natural looking photos of people, pets and hard to photograph subjects. The concept is simple and uses a trick photographers have known for years, but it’s the fact that it can be attached to your on-board camera flash that makes it so exciting.
I’m sure you’ve seen photographers use their large flash units to bounce light off the ceiling to photograph in low-light situations like wedding receptions, parties and more, and the Lightscoop works on the same principle. By using a simple mirrored system that slides easily over your camera’s hot shoe to direct your pop-up flash upwards, it bounces the light off the ceiling before it hits your subject. This bouncing of light diffuses the flash and makes for much more natural photos. The result is less red-eyed subjects, fuller color and life in your photos, and natural looking subjects with no harsh shadows. In short, it makes for much, much better photos.
While I do have an external flash unit that mounts on a flash bar that I connect to my SLR, I really love that the Lightscoop is much more portable, doesn’t take batteries, and doesn’t require a separate flash unit or flash bar. This makes it perfect for throwing in your camera bag just in case or simply leaving it attached to your camera while you’re at home. Since it is so lightweight and portable it’s so much more likely that you will actually carry it with you – which, in turn, means that you just might have it when you need it most.
While the Lightscoop has worked in every situation I have tried it in, including a room with a vaulted ceiling, it should be noted that the instructions recommend ceilings no higher than 8-12 feet or walls no further than 3-4 feet from the camera for best results. For more information as well as a list of compatible cameras, you can click {here} to be redirected to their instruction page.
If you have an SLR camera and are looking for a fairly cheap accessory that will give you much better indoor pictures, I would highly recommend the Professor Kobré’s Lightscoop®. Priced at $34.95, the Lightscoop would be the perfect addition to a photographer's stocking this Christmas!
I apologize for the lack of personal images in this post. I took the most gorgeous picture of my grandmother with the Lighscoop but technical difficulties (unrelated the the Lightscoop) prevented me from uploading them. A big thank you goes to Lightscoop for sending the sample to be reviewed. Even though I borrowed their pictures, you can rest assured that I did not borrow anything else for this review and all opinions are 100% ours.
