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“There’s a misunderstanding that LED lighting isn’t very powerful and is only good if you’re shooting in pitchblack”
Robert uses his Rotolight Neo 2s for weddings as well as fine-art and social portraiture, and it’s their versatility that really impresses him. “There’s a misunderstanding that LED lighting isn’t very powerful,” he says, “and only good if you’re shooting in pitch black, but you look at how people use these lights on film sets, and that’s not true at all. Sure, you’re not going to overpower the sun with them, but at weddings, I’ll often bring the couple into open shade and break out the Neo 2s to light them. Because of their bicolour design I can warm the light while I balance the sun and put some lovely colours back into the skin tones.” “They’re very bright if you turn them all the way up,” he continues, “but I often use them at around 10% power, and in that way it’s very much like using reflectors. If I’m doing shots of the bridal preparations and I need just a bit of light bouncing into the dress, I get a Neo 2 out, adjust the temperature for the location, and set the power to a low level. I think people often make the mistake of using LEDs on full power, but I want to work more subtly, just augmenting what’s in the scene for a natural look. So in that way, it’s much more like documentary photography, and with my Sony A7 III or A9 and fast lenses, I’ll shoot at high ISO all day at a wedding if I need to and get beautiful, clean images. I love working that way, with the continuous light from the LEDs, because I’m not worrying about flash settings – I’m just working to tell the story, uninterrupted.” This way of using the light means Robert can also work fast, he says,
and a great example of that was a shot he took at a December wedding in Penrith. “I was outside and there was just a little blue left in the sky,” he explains, “but it was about -5ºC! The only other light was from an orange streetlight, but it was the perfect place to get a dramatic portrait of the couple. So I set the camera to a white- balance of 3000K and lit the couple with a Neo 2 at its lowest temperature, setting the power to 10% to keep the subtlety of the scene. Then we got them out of the nice warm hall, did the shot super quick, and they were free to run back inside. If I’d used flash, there’s no way I could have done it as fast, because I’d have to test shots to get the exposure right, fiddle with the camera, and the flash would need to be gelled… But it was all done in minutes, and beautifully lit with the Neo 2.”
IN FOCUS: ROTOLIGHT NEO 2 £200 Rotolight’s Neo 2 combines a superb lighting solution with compact size and low weight.With a diameter of only 14.5cmand weighing just 354g, it can be run off a mains supply, or using 6xAAs, and has amaximumoutput of 2000lux at a distance of three feet. But it’s the Neo 2’s versatility that has really won over enthusiast photographers: As a bi-colour light, it can be dialled tomatch anything from tungsten to daylight conditions (3150-6300K), it comes with a range of filters to vary the look of the light and power output is controllable from 1-100%.And it can be used as a flash too.Add a Rotolight HSS transmitter (£238) and you can trigger the Neo 2 with its built-in ElinchromSkyport receiver fromup to 200maway, with its high-speed sync flashmode giving f/8 at ISO 200 at 3ft with no recycle time. rotolight.com
ABOVE Lighting this shot with the Rotolight Neo 2 (posiitoned high to the left) enabled Robert to get a dramatic, night-time shot of the couple quickly enough so that he – and they – didn’t freeze to death!
24 Photography News | Issue 73
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