I’ve been using my Walimex softbox for over a year now and I absolutely love the results. It’s light enough to be easy to handle without assistance, yet stable enough – thanks to the optional 3kg weight I added – to use without an anchoring bag or assistant. But it can be a little bit of a nuisance on occasion just because of its sheer size. The fact that it’s such a pain to dismantle and re-assemble means that I don’t: I prefer to leave it assembled permanently.
So for quicker, less “equipment-heavy” portraits, I decided to look around for alternatives and came up with the Ezybox Speed-Light, a smaller option similar to the one touted by none less than Joe McNally himself. This smaller version of the softbox (which also features a silver interior, rather than the white interior which Joe inspired Lastolite to make) folds pretty flat into a small version of one of the ubiquitous blue bags.
Although the illustration on the right shows the softbox mounted on the camera itself, I chose to take advantage of the lightness to mount it on a boom pole about seven feet off the ground for the portraits accompanying this article. Whilst the light isn’t as soft as it would be had I used the larger softbox, the smaller size and quicker preparation made the shoot much easier.
The light itself is still much softer than it would be with a direct flash and the slight “lip” to the edges means that there is slightly less spill light, too. I like the effect – in both pictures, pretty much all of the main lighting is coming from the Ezybox – and will be using it as a go-to solution when I don’t want to cart the larger softbox around.
(Thanks to Fräulein Wu for posing and to Jan for the use of his garden!)
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