Tag: Illuminator

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The Westcott Illuminator Reflector 6-in-1 Kit

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Photographers use reflectors to add light and defusers to soften light all the time. I was in need of a new reflector kit that I could take on the road. There are lots of reflector kits out there that come with reversible covers. Usually you’ll get white, silver, gold and perhaps black. The one thing that intrigued me the most about the Westcott Illuminator Reflector 6-in-1 Kit is that unlike most kits, they actually include TWO collapsible diffusers. One is a full-stop of diffusion and the other one is a two-stop diffuser. They include a reversible cover that has silver, gold, sunlight and black.

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With this one kit you can either have two separate diffusers or one diffuser and one reflector or one diffuser and one black/flag. That pretty much gives you everything you could want in the field.

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The nice big 42″ size is also a bonus because it can either diffuse a large area or bounce a larger amount of light therefore make it softer.

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You can get the Westcott Illuminator Reflector 6-in-1 Kit 42″ size here.

If you want one with an arm and stand, check out this kit.

 

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Westcott Chromakey Blue/Green Screen Popup Illuminator

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You might remember my video review of the F.J. Westcott uLight Green Screen Lighting Kit. Well this time I'm here to review another Westcott Green Screen solution. It's their Green/Blue Screen Popup Illuminator. The difference between this background and the uLite kit is that it's more portable. Like the other Illuminator backgrounds that I love so much, this one folds down (into a circle) and fits into a handy carrying case. Combine it with their popup Illuminator background stand you've got a Green Screen or Blue Screen background that sets up in about 2 minutes. This one also doesn't take as much room to setup and use. 

 

It's Holiday Greeting Card Time

Many of you are putting your Christmas or other Holiday cards together as we speak. It's great when you can setup the perfect setting and take the picture. However, sometimes you just don't have the perfect setting, so you need to improvise. That's where shooting on Green Screen really comes in handy.

Here's a quick test shot that I took just to see what I would get with minimal effort. I basically setup the background in my basement right under one of the flourescent lights in the ceiling. I aimed a Westcott Spiderlite TD5 with a small softbox right at my subject. I could have used a bigger softbox and the brighter daylight bulbs, but again this was just a test and the light was already there from another project that I had just done.

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I was worried at first that the ceiling light was too bright, but in fact it did a great job killing the shadows on the background. I fired this shot using my Nikon D700, 28-70mm lens at f/4.5, in Aperture Priority mode at 400 ISO. Yes, in RAW of course.

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Next I brought the shot into Adobe Photoshop CS4 and ran an Action that I learned how to setup from Dave Cross to AUTOMATICALLY extract her from the background

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