Creative Use For The Savage Light Wand

Creative Use For The Savage Light Wand

Recently Nicholas Pappagallo and I made a video review/unboxing of the Savage Universal RGB Light Wand and afterward we were sitting around the studio thinking that it might be a good idea to show how to use this in a creative way. The following is what we came up with.

So the idea was to use the light as a backdrop for a photograph. We could have had a model and makeup artist to come down to the studio and shoot some portraits, but I said “You know, I just bought this really cool bottle of Kavalan whiskey and I wonder how it would look with a colored light background”. Let me show you what we came up with and give you a brief description of how we did it.

The first thing to do was to set up the bottle and a strobe, compose the shot, and get the proper exposure for the strobe. 1/250 at f11 ISO 100. This killed off any ambient light and made sure the bottle was entirely in focus.

Next, it was time to figure out the light wand and get an exposure for it that would give us time to move the light around but still not introduce any ambient light in the room. We decided that 3 seconds worked.

Here’s the set. Camera on a tripod, tethered into my computer, an Einstein strobe with a 10 x 36 strip box shooting through medium Savage Universal Translum. The bottle sits on a sheet of 6m gloss black Lexan, there is a shiny gold card behind the bottle to reflect light from the strip box back through the bottle to light up the whiskey. The card, as a bonus, blocked the light from the light wand.

The shot goes like this, the light wand is set to multi mode, we trigger the camera from the computer, then immediately I waved the light wand around for the remainder of the exposure. The following image is one shot direct from the camera.

Next, we went for a composite shot. Two exposures, one with the wand set to red, and another set to green. We also used a bounce card to put a highlight on the tree ornaments. With a quick trip into Photoshop we had this.

The next one was Nick’s idea. He said “I wonder what would happen if we diffused the wand with something?”. So we cut off a piece of heavy weight translum and fashioned up a DIY diffuser for the wand.

This is the result of that experiment.
I hope you enjoyed this article/tutorial as much as we did making these photographs. Please comment below and let us know if you like this format and if it has inspired you to go and try these new tools we have available to us.