Over the past year I’ve been working with the people at Light & Motion to show off their incredible Stella LED lights. There’s lots of benefits to using LED lights for both photography and video. These continuous lights are powerful, lightweight, don’t generate heat, don’t need to be plugged in, produce daylight balanced light, are dimmable and, as a bonus, several of the Light & Motion Stellas are completely submersible. I’ve got the Stella 5000, Stella 2000 and the Stella 1000 lights. They can go anywhere I can go.
This last spring I did a shoot with some friends on a camping trip to Big Sur. We were setting up a outdoor, fashion-style shot in a creek to show off the qualities of the lights. I’m photographing Gabbie Morfeld and there’s a Stella 5000 on a light stand to my right as the key. The Stella 2000 that we’re using as a backlight is clamped to a branch, and the Stella 1000 is in the creek filling in shadows. Photo © Daniel Brittain
Here you can see the little Stella 1000 just sitting in the water. Check out how sharp the 120° beam angle is, which allows for very precise feathering of the lights. Photo © Ralph Clevenger (l) and Daniel Brittain ®
The shot on the left is the final of Gabbie with the 3 lights. I lit the portrait of Daniel with just the Stella 1000 underwater in front of him. ISO 2500, f/4, 1/60th sec with the Sony A7R2, 16–35mm f/4.
