Using a Ring Light for Photography

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Joey Gunz and you can check me out on line at www.joeygunz.com. I here on behalf of Expert Village to bring you the final and 16th part of our improve your photography tutorial. In today's session, what we are going to be talking about is high end, professional before now kind of very difficult, kind of get your hands on light modification or light producing unit. I have in my hand what is called a ring light and it is called a ring light because the strobe tube is in the shape of a ring. What makes this unit special is the 4 inch diameter that we have right in the middle of this unit. Now this particular unit is a fairly new unit by arb800 by Paulsey Bluff. You can go on line and check them out at arb800.com. They sell this unit and is fairly affordable and it comes in under $500. Traditionally these units will cost you anywhere from 11 to $1500 just for the head and with the pack in head system, you actually have to invest in a 2 to $3,000 battery pack as well, so this tends to be a fairly high end market that only professional photographers use. But now days you can buy, it works with an AC power source. You can plug it into a wall anywhere that you go and what you do is kind of turn this thing on. You will notice that its got this ring of modeling, these cords modeling lights up front and you can kind of mount this thing or hold it as a grip and just kind of look through there and it gives you your flash as you want to pop it. Now why would someone want to use a ring flash. The answer is very simple. The ring when you project it produces a very kind of hard direct light, directly on your subject but it eliminates shadows like those shadows that may fall from one light to off to the side. Because this light is center, because the lenses directly in the middle of this light. When you take an image, you can pretty much assumed that you are going to light up your subject with no shadows across their nose if they turn or whatever; you don't get any shadows. Now you will kind of see a little small shadow that outlines your subject. Some people call it cliché; sometimes it is one of those kind of definitive marks that you find in fashion photography. You will see it a lot in the fashion industries because it eliminates the shadows on the clothing. So to wrap we've got a ring light here; we are going to talk real quickly about the ARB line. They actually do make some fairly innovated products that go along with this to kind of modify the light. One of those products is just kind of a reflector; it kind of fits in the middle here. It kind of uses to kind of disperse or give it kind of like a scattered lighting effect. Another unit that we have here is that you can use to modify the light coming off this ring flash is their octave moon box or something like that. It is just basically the light fired back into this thing and back through the diffusion panels. It gives us kind of like a soft box effects for ring light. So innovated new product brought to you by Paulsey Bluff ARB; fairly affordable and we are lucky enough to have one here in the studio. If you want to see the effects what you can do with some glamor photography in the studio, go on line and check me out at www.joeygunz.com. For Expert Village, I am signing off and thank you for tuning in to watch our 16th part tutorial and remember, the knowledge is free; you just have to know where to find it. Check me out on line at www.joeygunz.com."