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Our Favorite “Sticks”

In this video we're talking about sticks that's right folks well we referred to basically any type of stand tripod anything you'd hang lights or cameron we refer to as a stick you guys can call whatever you like but I like calling them sticks okay logan is going to help me out because we have a bunch of these sticks to show you also logan wanted to give me first hour tripod number one give me the tripod yes did you see his lovely hands? Logan has such beautiful hands it could be a hand model okay, so this is the me photo and this is actually the me photo glowed globetrotter carbon fiber okay? They have several different versions of their they're tripods they have the meat photo road trip as well as the globetrotter. The road trip is a little bit of a less expensive smaller tripod the globetrotter is just a little bigger hopeful more weight and so forth and you can get both variants in either just the standard aluminum or carbon fiber I offer carbon fiber causes a little bit stronger mo...

re durable and it's also lighter. All right, so these guys they start from anywhere between one hundred fifty all the way up to three hundred fifty dollars depending on whether you're buying the aluminum or the carbon fiber variance but this is one area to say this we've used a ton of tripods and there's lots of fans tastic tripod brands out there there's a lot of brands that you can invest in like really right stuff they make great tripods, great adapters and mounts and so forth, but you're going to spend a lot of money on them granted, they're gonna last you forever there's also a lot of really cheap tripods out there that basically you spend, you know fifty bucks on and they'll last for six months and then they break in half to get to repurchase every single six months or every year going by maur tripods what we've found from all of our testing from our usage is that me photo offers a fantastic product at a great value so based on the price yes it's not the least expensive tripod out there and it's also not the most expensive but what you're getting for that price is a fantastic product so it's one those areas I would recommend it spending a little money on don't always go with the cheapest option because in the long run it will end up costing you more now this tripod of features the quarter twist legs okay, so I kind of dig the quarter twist legs so that makes it very easy and simple teo open and close they also have the snapping leg the ones that kind of clip clothes which are great to quarter twist is kind of, you know, just simple but each one of them does have their own like advantages and kind of disadvantages. Sometimes the quarter twist nam's these need to be tightened or loosened every now and then. But you can see how small this will fold up to and actually in its travel motive gets even smaller because the legs can actually fold up so you khun basically turn the head just a little bit and then fold the legs up right here so we can put this into uber travel mode. Well, this will fit into any carry on case. Okay, so these guys get really, really small. Check that out. That's, my full tripod. The other thing that's cool about this is that they feature artist swiss plates and these are christmas plates are incredibly inexpensive to get. You could get our christmas plates on amazon for like ten bucks, which is nice because we constantly lose tripe on plates and so we want to buy twenty thirty dollar plates for these guys. All right, so that's it for our tripod. Now let's, go ahead and show you our most typical light stand. This is the man photo nano stand okay now, as you can see, this guy is is not very robust in terms of like it's not designed to hold a lot of weight we use this for basically are single flash mounted like stand when we're typically shooting bare bulb if you are shooting with an umbrella or you're doing whatever modification to this you need to make sure that this is weighted and that you know preferably someone's holding it because it's really not the kind of stand that you want to put a lot of weight on but these air the stands will use in like the corners of a wedding reception no we use these on engagement shoots when her bare building and those kind of things because they're small they're very unobtrusive and so they can get in now very easily we also have on top of this just a little adapter you can buy these adapters on amazon this is just an umbrella adapter westcott makes a fantastic one that's very durable and this allows youto you know mountain your not only your flash but also your umbrella onto there these air known as by the way cold shoe flash mounts or cold shoe adapters cold shoe umbrella and after what you want to call him but they distinguishing in cold chu versus a hot shoe because of culture does not trigger your flash basically okay so cultures don't trigger the flash hot shoes are designed to actually have a sink port so you can actually sync to the hot shoe and it will trigger the flash so this is just a inexpensive cold shoe umbrella adapter and they're like between ten and twenty bucks all right so you could see how small this guy gets when he fold him up a cz well he goes up to about I don't know like six feet roughly this guy costs about sixty five bucks and yes again there are cheaper options out there okay you can get light stands for twenty bucks the problem is they don't last you a long time this guy has you know well me justin chris we've used these on hundreds of shoots each year and we're still on the original set that we have purchased the only time they ever break it if you step on them or you bend them in half or some like that but these are extremely durable little guys they're very lightweight very small they fit easily in a travel on bag and so forth so he's the one that we recommend they're really gonna last you much longer than any twenty dollars life stand would all right, we're done with that guy give me the ben romano pod now this guy is a ben romano pod is with the s forehead it's about two hundred bucks now of course you khun by less expensive mama pods for just mounting your lighting here but here's what I would say do not go and purchase two thousand dollars of lighting here and then put it on a twenty dollar amazon basics modified that's just a recipe for disaster this is our go to mono pod and this by the way the actual leg itself is a for eight f b m g aluminum magnesium aluminum mono pod what a fantastic name and you can see that I've actually taken off the s forehead because when we use it just for lighting we don't need the head on there we just take it off then we put this brass spigot over that quarter I think it actually is a little bit of a larger amount but basically it adapts this to a quarter twenty screw hole if we need that but what we do over that is we place our light modifier so we can put an umbrella adapter but more typically we're using the pro photo or if I speed ring over this guy ok so you can pop that right over here and then just fasten it to the mono pod then you place your flashing your choice your modifier your choice and you have a fantastic boom stick what we called a boom stick because you khun boom it into any position that you want you can swing it at your producer get out of your job and I'm skidding he's too far away anyway even though I would like to do that sometimes okay so and it also sounds cool by the way doesn't it sound cool a boom stick get the boom stick and your clients like yeah that's kind of the freaking awesome getting the boom stick okay so this is the typical set up for this and this is what we're talking about where you know if you have just a single speed light you can mount that to a twenty dollar amazon basics mono pod no problem but we mount this with the modifier with the flashes with the battery and everything this is going to be like roughly fifteen pounds and when it catches wind and so forth it's gonna be twenty thirty, forty pounds of resistance and you don't want to be holding that clear up here with two thousand dollars of lighting year on a twenty dollar mono pod you wanna have some that'll actually hold up to it so this is kind of that go to route that I would highly recommend for years it's also very small compact and lightweight so when you take everything apart and you can pack this up we'll see compact this up I don't think that the right word at all whatever and then logan we give you this speed ring back okay and then you can fold up his little legs on the bottom just pulling in there we go there we go okay this is that travel size so again very small khun go pretty much anywhere and be a fantastic boom stick all right let me give you this guy and why don't you give me our next semi portable boom stand this guy and there's, actually, different variants of this. But I believe this one is the photo dio yeah, this is the photo diode boom, stan, this guy's about eighty bucks it's, a fantastic stand for what it does. And for the price. I've actually been very, very impressed with it. And the cool part about it is that it actually features a reflector holder on this. Okay, so what you can do is you, khun boom this out and you can see right here that we have a reflector holder. So right here we can put a reflector there we can put one up here and it khun grape a reflector and then it khun boom it to kind of whatever position you want. So it has this little booming port right here. So if you pull is all the way out, come on, come on. There we go. Okay? And you can see that we can actually have an adjustable boom arm and you can raise the whole thing up. You can actually sandbag this it's actually fairly decent in terms of a semi portable rather slightly more heavy duty life stand or reflector or modifier stand so it's, another great one and for the price it's pretty much can't really beat it it's a great price all right, let me show them the c stand now. So why don't you grab this guy? This is a matthew ceased and this is the industry standard when it comes to lighting, modifications stands and so forth matthews they in my pain I've used a lot of overseas and they're all create you know, to be honest, they're all great, but I prefer matthews. Why? Because they're at a great price point one hundred thirty bucks. They're pretty much hollywood standard when it comes to lighting gear and they also feature very ergonomic knuckles so these knuckles are very easy, tio very easy on the hands so you can basically adjust this and then boom is in a position. I'm gonna put this out to the side for one second and you could see that so we can have a booming arm and then the whole stand can raise up several feet. We have large legs that we could put sandbags on and so forth. So this is a fantastic see stand. So for studio work, we highly recommend these matthews c stands all right, so that's it when it comes to our favorite sticks, let me go ahead and put this guy down and we also did mention, like some other options, you know, on here, like if a budget is a concern. We have included some other inexpensive options. Just keep in mind that generally, when you're going with the less expensive options, they're not going as well built, of course, and so you will be pertinent and more often and will end up being more expensive in the long run. But that might not matter to you, because maybe you just need something right now for twenty bucks, you don't want to invest yet and that's completely a viable option. So check out the slide to see maur information as well. We're doing this video let's. Hang on to the next one now.