I have not been shooting much with speedlites lately. But since the drastic recent events, they have become a cheaper alternative to monoblocs. But not using monoblocs does not necessary mean lousier photos. End of the day, it really is about how you modify your lights and use them to the fullest potential.

So here’s an example of using speedlites for a simple shoot.

I have always wanted to do a shoot for friend and classmate of mine, Jerry Yeo, who is a budding Mediacorp artist. You know lah, budding artists can always use a few good photos to promote themselves.

So, without my usual monoblocs, beauty dish and blah blah blah, what can one expect?

Turns out that using speedlites was the best decision.

For this shoot, i used the following set up:

  • Sony Alpha-900
  • Sigma 50mm f/1.4
  • Speedlites x 2
  • Easyfold softbox for speedlites
  • Shoot-thru umbrella
  • lightstands x 2
  • M1-rotatable light stand

Special praises to Jinbei for developing an awesome lightstand-boomstand hybrid, the M1 rotatable light stand. If you are considering a lightstand for both commercial and hobby use, do check them out here.

Ok, enough of hardcore selling. Here’s how the shoot went.

I started off by hooking up the easy-fold softbox onto the boom standand light my subject top-down on-axis. Simple stuff here.

Setup one

Thing is, it created a tad too much shadows underneath the chin, eyes etc for my liking (Jerry’s publicity manager would agree i reckon).

Setup one effect

So the natural thing to do was to pop a fill light to get rid of those shadows. Question here is, with my second speedlite, on which side do you point your subject?

A good alternative is to fill him up bottom up. I’m not too concerned with the potential ‘ghost lighting’ effect because the second speedlite was about two stops weaker than my key light (the easyfold softbox).

Setup two

So.. using this simple setup, i got quite a few good shots for Jerry to use for his publicity photos.

Setup two effect

But knowing me, I’m not about to end my shoot here. I made some slight changes to the lighting setup and did some creative stuff with Jerry. It was somewhat a productive session from the two hours that we had.

Here’s one for the record. I will find another time to talk about this setup. And yes, it was done with two speedlites.

Setup three effect

Ok, i told myself this is going to be a short entry. So i’ll leave it to you to try it out and see if it works out fine for you guys.

Note: I did this entire lighting setup alone and did not have any assistants. So no excuses for not being able to do it alone.