What Chuck Does

Lumiquest Softbox III

As an answer to my DIY beauty dish failure and also wanting a portable softbox, I bought the Lumiquest Softbox III for about $35 from Adorama (free shipping and no tax, yay!)

It consists of 5 panels, 4 of which fold onto the sides of your flash head (in my case a Nikon SB-800) and 1 of which is translucent and acts as the softbox. It spans 8x9” and looks like this unlit:

You can see it’s only about 2x the height of the speedlight in this position. Here’s how it looks lit (by the way I didn’t bother to post-process these pictures other than resizing and cropping):

Here’s a picture of the SBIII from behind. You can also see the light pattern from the picture. Hopefully this isn’t the light pattern from the umbrella and camera left that’s lighting the frame:

So! Aside from the size and portability of the SBIII what’s so great about it? The soft light combined with the fast light falloff can create effects that are a little more dramatic in nature. After reading David Hobby’s blog, I’ve seen how effective the SBIII can be when used up close. For example here’s a shot of the SBIII overhead handheld:

With the dramatic light falloff, I figured I’d go shirtless and see how far the light travels when up close. The following shot was processed for size, crop and a few random specular highlights (reflections of the light) in the background. See how nicely the light drops off just past the shoulders.

Here’s another angle where you can see more of the light falloff and an excuse to take pictures of my abs:

It can also do wonders for lighting your dog too. Here’s Amy with a lot of light/shadow contrast. Actually so much so that I had to bring up the shadows just a tad in post processing:

Overall I can find a lot of uses for hte Lumiquest SBIII. It’s never going to replace a full-sized softbox and will never duplicate the gradual light falloff of larger units, but for the size, portability, price (well it’s not that cheap) it can’t be beat.