Monday, March 2, 2015

Lighting Up (a product review)

We've all seen product reviews in which the visuals really seem to pop, and one reason for that extra shine and shimmer is the proper lighting. We at Braintrust Digital have been in search of a good lighting kit, and this one just might make our next Gear of the Year list (yes, it's early in 2015, but we're always on the lookout for great ideas).

The lights are the Octacool-9 (a funny name for a lighting system that has 9 lights instead of 8, but we think they named it Octacool just because the outer diffuser is the Octabox).

The price from Amazon for one Octacool-9 light and stand is about $300, but we were able to get into them for about $100 less. How? We separated our buy of the light and the stand.

The stands we ended up with are the Cowboy Studios 806 series stands. No they're not Matthews, but they also aren't priced accordingly. For these, we were able to get them at $30 each.

We've used Matthews before, and will probably use them for our upcoming green-screen setup, but for these Octacool-9 lights, the Cowboy 806 series seem to mount and stay in place, rather than riding away (or tipping over).

So that's our quick setup. Next up we'll look at a background support system, probably the #3046 one from Impact, which runs about $100 at either B&H or Amazon...