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Gear Setup - Setting Up a “Medium Boom Stick”

How to set up a pocket strobe medium boom sticks so basically we're going to be getting more power but we're still doing pocket strobe so this is going to be roughly well about one hundred fifty, two hundred eighty watt seconds worth of light with three strobes set up or three pocket strobes okay, so it's going to get started? The first thing you're going to need is either a cold shoe version of this this is the this is the cheetah t s h one twenty this is a three bracket hot shoe mount okay, so you can have a cold shiver to this which, for example, the westcott triple threat is the cold shoe version of this exact think well they don't look the same but it has the same functionality the hot shoe version this has a three point five million report here right on the side but I can run a pop quiz on cable too and trigger all the flashes on this because these are all hot shoe feet or ports and all it does is it mounts to a single quarter twenty male screw on the bottom side ok, so all I nee...

d to do here is the beautiful thing about this is that we can mount this to virtually anything let's say that we don't have a light stand with us let's say that we forgot it but we do have a tripod well the tripod again it comes standard with that quarter twenty mount forth about in your camera and that's the same mount for this guy so I have to do is just screw this guy right onto the tripod plate and now we're basically good to go also if I wanted to just put it onto a light stand I could grab my little spigot here all I need is a a three eighths inch too quarter twenty adapter which is this guy put that right here on to there and now I could mount it directly to my life stand so the point being is that I want to show you all how easy it is to adapt and to put these devices and brackets onto virtually anything so if you want it to be you know, on a tripod you can put on that country on a light stand you can put it on there you want to be on a c stand you can put it on that you just need the right basically adapter to do so so let's go ahead, logan you want to take this guy out of the frame so we don't need this anymore thanks, buddy. Like that it kind of just like crept out of the frame like like on its own two legs that was a little creepy but that's all the logan logan's awesome and joe's awesome my team is awesome okay, so now that this is on our life stand let's go ahead and his pop the flash is on and I'm gonna show you in just a moment. Of course, this brackett right here. This cheetah is best when used with manual strokes, but right now we're using full feature strobes. So if you're using full finger scrubs, all you need is the westcott triple threat, which is thirty bucks instead of, like fifty or sixty bucks for this guy, but it's still gonna allow me to demonstrate this and I want to use it for that demonstration. Okay, I'm gonna grab my other metro's this's for mitrice's and you can see how this is already getting kind of expensive, right? Because we're using four pocket strobes these air each four hundred bucks a pop. And so if we need this much power, we might be just better off going with, say, larger strobes going with a medium strobe or even a full stroke. But the benefit of this is of course there is a lot of portability to this because we can have this inside of like, a carry on bag and we can set up, you know, on location and it's very simple and easy to do. Now with these directed forward, you can see that I now have three flashes all set up together okay, so before I go ahead and put the actual the west kind of pollo of strip box on here, let me just show you how I would operate this I'm gonna flip these around just so you guys can see the backs of these. Okay, turn all them on. I have my odin right here. So generally, when I'm firing everything from a single light source, I'll place all these on the same channel and group, so I'm gonna put them all on channel one and on group a so let's place this guy keep pressed the wrong button. There we go. Group a let's go to this guy. Same thing group a perfect. So everything's channel one and group a now on here I can control channel one and group ages directly from that top line is I'm going to power everything in channel one in group a up to one eighth power. Okay, perfect. Now I'm gonna place this back towards you guys and you all can see that as I start shooting, all three of these are firing each and every time. Now that gives me three times the power in a single light source, right? All have to do at this point is if we want to modify that light, we can place a modifier over this so that we have modification so let's, go ahead and do that, but we're going to that in just one moment, because I do want to demonstrate the sinking capabilities of our, uh, our little cheetah thing before we continue. So let me just pop in a pocket wizard was gonna plug it right into the port. So there's a port right here on this side, and I don't need to set up a pop quiz on my camera, I just want to demonstrate this one feature, okay? So now with this plugged in, aiken basically trigger all three of these flashes, but here's, the thing, if I click test right now, you'll find that none of them are actually working. The reason is that the way that these flashes work, these air full feature flashes and I have them set all as odin receiver's remember the radio mode that we talked about earlier, so they're not they're not prepped toe receive any sort of signal, so what I need to do on each of them is I need to go back and basically turn them two operational slaves, okay? So basically, we're just going to slip these to the radio mode where it would actually allow something else to trigger these guys now, generally, this isn't necessary, like, say, on a you know if you're on a manual flash this isn't a step that you have to do but here's the thing is that I don't want to take all three of these often put manual strobe on there just take too much extra time so we're going to assume that we're using manual strobes all around and now with a single and now with a single pock wizard aiken trigger all three of these flashes at the same time okay, so that's how that works now they're all set to one to one right now so they're recycled times are very slow so if I do it again here we go beverly okay, so that's how we would trigger three manual strobes that are all placed on his hashi bracket via a pocket wizard that we don't need three pop quizzes to do so let's go ahead and just unplug that I'm gonna go ahead and put my odin I don't know why I took this guy off if I was gonna set it up for you all but go ahead and place this back on the camera you said this guy down here and we're going to go ahead and just flip by the way to flip the radio modes on this guy all I'm doing is I'm pressing this button right here is the m dash s button master slave bun you hold it down and then it gives you the difference radio modes so I wanted to be in an odin receiver mode. Okay, so all these are going to receivers for whatever odin trigger that I'm using some place odin receiver and same thing here, go back to odin receiver. Okay, we can double check just to make sure that all three of these air still working by just grabbing our odin trigger. Ok? We're all good. Okay, so now at this point, this is where we would say let's place the modifier on here. So generally, before I place all the modifiers, I just trying to everything on the same channel, the same grouping and everything to get it all set up, so I don't want to really fiddle around with radio settings once this is set. So we're going to do now is we're gonna open up. This is the westcott apollo strip. I'm demonstrating with this guy because he's smaller than the apollo orb and so it's a little bit easier for me to kind of navigate this on our set. So we're just gonna open this up at the bottom. You see this zipper right there, so we're just gonna go ahead and open up zipper, you just bring this down a little bit, actually, and now we're gonna place this entire thing just over are flashes now, here's, what we gotta do notice how the flasher pointing towards you guys? What I want to do is I want to have the backs of the flashes facing outside, ok? The reason why is because if I need to make any adjustments, it's easier to do that from this side, so I'm just going to turn these also that they're facing into that soft box and they were going to place this item right through the umbrella port right there. We're going to open it up the umbrella port a little bit and then just bring that rod through and tighten it up. So now we have that place. Now, once this is place, this is when we'd come down and just zip up the bottom piece right here because this is what prevents basically light spill from from leaking from losing too much light. All right, so now we're basically all set. So now we've turned our three flashes here, our medium booze sick into a modified light. So now when I fire, you can see all three of them are firing into the back of that, and then they're coming out. Now the other wonderful thing obviously is very easy to connect the diffusion panel to this I do want to show you all wrote quick, the grid panel, so this is the west kind of policy grid I'm gonna go ahead and just set the separate quick so you guys can see it, even though I'm kind of stepping out of frame it is okay, so all this does is it just bell crows around the outside of our strip box? And what I would do is I would generally defuse this as well. So it's defused and gritted, so that way, I can really control where the light is going. Okay, so we're just gonna attach that to the top. Go to the right side, okay, touch the bottom of the right side and then go through the middle, do the bottom. Not gonna do a very not gonna do a very thorough job of this. Right now, we're just gonna do it kind of haphazardly. All right? You guys get the basic gist of this so very quickly, very easily. I now have a strip. I have a strip soft box or a gritted strips off box. And again, the beautiful part about this is just how small this all packs up to be when you needed to take it on location. So when you take us anywhere, it folds up to the size of umbrellas, you get everything, including the life stands, the flash is all inside of one small little you know bag and you take us on the location you have a full soft box with grid with diffusion with everything that you could possibly need and inside of it we have basically a total of around one hundred sixty you know, roughly one hundred fifty, two hundred sixty watt seconds worth of power or roughly, you know, like one hundred eighty guide number so have three of these strokes, which is a decent amount of power. Three of these strobes is basically enough too kind of basically balance daylight so you can shoot with three of these modified strobes at full power you will be able to see that light when modified over your subject. The only thing is that you need to place your modifier close to the subject still because it's not that much power so three modified strobes will actually be visible in daylight but again for the price you're talking about quite an expensive setup for these items but hear us out. This is the beauty and having a full feature system when you're set up like this now I don't have to have an assistant reach through the side and try and make adjustments the power resume I could do all of that just directly from my remote right here, so if I want to power these all up to full power I could do that and now when I fire I have full power re cycles, of course, it's not going to recycle now, because everything's firing at full power, you can hear them on each recycling. Okay, so that's. How to set up this portable medium boom stick. You can places onto a boom. You can place it onto a light stand. You can place it onto a c stand on a tripod wherever you want, but have three times the power with simply pocket strobes. Hopefully, enjoy. The video is go ahead and move to the next gear set up now.