Today on The Slanted Lens, we’re reviewing Spiffy Gear’s Light Blaster. This is a very unique piece of equipment. You can put your Speedlight in the back, any lens you want on the front, and it projects whatever image you put inside. You can make the projections smaller or larger depending on the lens you put on it. There are a lot of creative possibilities with this.
One disadvantage is that it is not a modeling light. Also, you can get a parallax if you have to put it off to the side. It would be good if you could put it directly behind your talent and use their body to hide it to avoid getting a parallax.
There are gobos and slides that you can put into it, but you can also make your own slides. This is a great new innovative piece of lighting equipment.
What would you do with a Light Blaster?
Thanks for watching. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.
Video Transcription
Hi, this is Jay P Morgan. Today, for our Slanted Lens review, we are going to review an item called the light blaster. This is a very fascinating piece of equipment. I haven’t seen anything quite this unique in a long, long time. What it is, is a device that you could put your speed light in the back. You put any lens you want in the front and then it projects on the screen, on a wall, on the floor whatever image that you put inside. So, I’ll set up with the camera. Right now, I’ve got my camera lens on there. The nice thing about the ability to put lenses on this, is, you can either make it small or large, you can really project whatever size you want. So, just like the lenses, because we are in a confined space for the shots that we did, we put a 16 to 35 mm lens on it and we get that big 16, it really, really broadens our image out. It was only a few feet behind myself on the bicycle, so it was very easy for us to get the image on the background. You know, there’s a lot of creative possibilities with something like this. Drawback for me, using it, it wasn’t a modern light. It would have been nice to be able to see the lens as I go to a wider angle or closer, be able to see that image change. So that was a bit of a disadvantage as you’re working with it, but the nice thing is that you use your, like I said, your speed goes in the back. It gives you the ability to adapt it to any image you want to put in there. This is a method of shooting that I really learned in photography and that is the days when you didn’t have Photoshop. You could put these kinds of images in the shot that you’re doing, you combine it. So, you’d use it in your strobe light to really set in your background and you get your strobes on your people, and you bounce all those things on set. I’m going to take this out next and I’m going to play with it on location, try to put some big shadows up a wall. Looks like a person’s shadow on the wall, just some interesting things like that with it. I think there are just some fun things you could do with this, you know, just to be creative and go after it.
A couple things we learned when we are shooting with this, on set. One is, when you’re doing your imagery, as close as you can get it to the axis of the lens, you don’t get a parallax And so, we had ours off to the side, which kind of make the image grow to one side, gets larger on one side and smaller on the other. You could put this on the stand, right directly behind the individual and project on the wall, let the individual hide it. That would be a great way to be able to keep that from dealing >with that parallax problem. So, it’s really nice, you’ve got goggles that go in here, gives you a nice, just a very simple plug it in. It’s great, the very stark, black and white. Now, when you get to slides, you have a lot of different options. They do have a catalog of different slides you can order to go with it, different kinds of backgrounds, different kinds of scenery that give you some options but you can make your own slides as well. It’s not as easy as it used to be but hey, with as many hipsters as there are in the world today, there’s people still shooting film out there today. This is a fun piece of lighting equipment. We don’t get new and innovative lighting equipment very often and this is one of those things. So, take it out, give it a spin, and see what it can do. Remember, we’re giving one of these away in our international giveaway. So, go to TheSlantedLens.com or neurotrigger or lightblaster TheSlantedLens.com