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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott
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Photography is really about capturing light. And of course, we that are photographers or videographers, we are constantly looking for
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the interplay of light with our subjects. But one of the challenges that you have is that when you try to control that light
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Sometimes it could be a challenge to get light where you need it, either by direction or because of the tightness of space
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or just impacting something along or powering it. So imagine with me how useful 1,500 lumens worth of light
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in a small package that was waterproof and able to be remotely controlled
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via Bluetooth on an app from your cell phone. Imagine how useful that would be
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When a friend suggests to me that I should take a look at the Luma Cube even do a review of it, I thought, hey, that sounds pretty cool
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I could certainly see applications for that amount of light. And so I contacted my friends at B&H, and they agreed to send one out to me so I could take a look at it
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And I was right up until the day that the package arrived, I was expecting it to be a reasonably
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large thing. Instead, I got... Yeah, that's right. This. Can you imagine with me how useful 1,500 luminous..
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of light is in a one and a half inch cube that can be dropped into water, submerged down to 100 feet
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controlled by your app on your phone via Bluetooth. Yeah, that's pretty useful. I was amazed at how
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small and how well-built this little metal cube was. There's a port in the back that you can
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open up that will allow you to charge it. It's internally powered. And depending on the output
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setting at its highest setting at that 1,500 Lumen output, it will last for about 30 minutes
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but at 50% power, it will last up to two hours. I have found that already there are a ton of creative uses that I can come up for this
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little cube, even when I am at home and I have access to more conventional lighting
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Because it's so small, it's so easy to position, I can take a little tiny kind of pocket
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tripod and screw that in and put it in any kind of position angle it turn it And so I have found that all of a sudden I able to try things out like illuminating things from underwater or playing with it in a variety of ways
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And so it really has opened up a lot of creative options for me. So simply put, I'm having a blast with this little cube
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Of course, one of the great purposes of it is if you're doing video work and not just using
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it for stills photography. It provides you a constant light source, and actually the initial reason that I was interested in it is because often I do my reviews of camera equipment lenses out of doors
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And often, while I typically use natural light, if I'm out somewhere in the woods, it would be great to have a little extra light on me to lift the shadows and then also to provide some separation of me from the background
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And so I originally got a brought in with that in mind, but when I saw how compact it was, of course, the ways in which you can use it jump right open
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I'm really looking forward to trying this out when I have a chance in warmer weather to do a little snorkeling or scuba diving and taking along a GoPro or waterproof camera kit and one or two of these to light
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Can you imagine upping that to 3,000 lumens with a couple of these and how much revolutionary that could be
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The amount of light that this little cube puts out is really quite staggering
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At its fullest power, you really can't even stand to look at it because it is so incredibly bright
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And I found that I can throw it into a soft box. And I've got an example here of powering right on the set, just using one of these inside of the soft box
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And so right now, just to show you, while I'm in a studio setting, all I've got is just one Luma Cube
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And I've thrown it up inside one of my soft boxes to
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my right and so that I can diffuse the light a little bit. But to give you an idea of my settings
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right now, I'm at ISO 400, and I'm shooting at 1.30th of a second at F2. And so what we'll do is
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because I have the remote app and I can control the light output from the LumaCute, I'm going to
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bring the lighting down. And you're going to find very likely that the tracking from the camera is
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going to lose me altogether. But even if I take that down to, say, one eighth of the lighting
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you see that I now pretty much disappeared And as I start to bring that back up and we find that here once again at full lighting that I got a nice amount of light back on me And so it shows you how that just one of these little tiny cubes can provide a significant amount of light
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And if you can imagine an array with a few of them, that even in daylight conditions
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you could definitely provide some fill light. It's also been really liberating to be able to put it underwater
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and to see the various ways you can play with light coming from
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underneath the water and that's been one cool aspect or to add light perhaps on a background to
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add a little boca to it or perhaps to give a very directional light on a subject and i've taken a ton
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of different photos using this as either the primary or a secondary light source and had been
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really impressed with the way it's accomplished and so to use it wirelessly it's really quite
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simple there is a free app that you download that will allow you to connect with this and connection
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comes quite quickly, and I found that very easy to use, and then you have options
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It's really set up as far as strobing. It's set up to sink more with your foam
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and I don't very often do foam-based photography, and so I won't use it a lot for that
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But the thing that I find really useful is there you have a slider where you can directly
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control the amount of output from it in a very defined and also a smooth up-and-down way
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On the light itself, you can, of course, power it up, can strobe it
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but you can also power it up, just stepping it up slowly, slowly, slowly into its brightest point
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And then it will cycle back down to the lower setting. And so you can, of course, directly do it, but controlling it via Bluetooth allows you to kind of just smoothly ramp that power output
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And of course, if you've got it underwater or in a remote location, it's really cool to have that wireless control over it
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And, of course, if you have a couple of these, you can actually control several of them via the free app
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you want to control a larger array, you can control up to, I think, five or six of them via
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a pro app that cost a few bucks. And so, of course, and having unique control over each one of them and their amount of output
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So there's a lot of creative options that are opened up through that. I should also note that on the bottom there is a threading for it to be thrown onto a standard
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tripod mount at quarter inch end, and so you can add it to a lot of things
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I've also found it quite useful. If you happen to have or you want to purchase something like a Joby Gorilla Pod which I often carry with me it screws right into that and then of course because of those flexible legs you can attach it to a railing or a tree branch and you can position the light very easily the way that you want
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Now, as far as a shortcomings, of course, shortcomings would be that at its maximum power
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you only have 30 minutes worth of light. Of course, when it goes dead, it's as easy as plugging, opening up the back and plugging in a mini-USB
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charge or cord to it and connecting it to a power source
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And it does come with one of those in the box, but of course that's a very, very common standard now
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There's a good chance you have a few of those lying around. It charges fairly quickly, and so then you're back in business
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So beyond the battery life, the other thing that I have noted is that at its maximum setting
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the casing will start to get hot after a while. And I noticed that in particular when I had it in a soft box
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It does have sinks, heat sinks that are kind of part of the, design but when it was in an enclosed space I did find that it made it hot to touch
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not painfully warm but definitely quite hot to touch and then the only other
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thing that I can think of you might think of as a con simply because it's so small is its price which is seventy nine dollars and I'll throw a link down
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below if you want to shop for more of them there are also a variety in the
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the link here you also find a variety of different hardware options and
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accessories to help you use it using for gopros or or an array of several of them
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They also come in a kit of two of them or a kit of four of them
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depending on what you're looking for in your application. But when you begin to consider how well built this is
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and how many ways that you can use it, despite it being very small, it seems like money well spent
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And I've actually already got an order in to add another one for myself
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because I can think of so many ways to use this. Some things you find, they're just really, really cool
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And this is certainly one of those things. Really the creative possibilities are endless, and I'm looking forward to discovering more of them as I move ahead and making this part of my projects
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It certainly helped over the last month in the blas of late winter
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When you're kind of running out of creative ideas, this has opened up a number of new ones for me
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I'm Dustin Abbott, and thanks for watching. If you haven't already, please subscribe
