Photographers, here's the deal, you're going to have to buy some gear to make this happen. But luckily for you, I am a very frugal photographer. And I've already done a lot of research and a lot of testing to find the best stuff for the least price to make it work. And that's what I want to share with you in this part of the video. Now, before we get going, I want to say two things. One, if you do buy any of this gear, please use the affiliate links on our resources page, they'll bring you right to Amazon right to the product.

And a few percent of the sale goes to us. And it doesn't cost you anything different than if you went to Amazon and just search for these things. So it's a huge help for us because then we can take that money and produce future videos on other topics to put out there for you. The second thing I want to say is that we are not sponsored or paid by any of these gear manufacturers. This is just things that we found that work really well. And I want to give you essentially a kit of gear.

That'll get you going for the least amount of dollars, but give you good quality. Okay, that disclaimer said, here we go. We're going to start from the bottom up. So what's the first thing you need if you want to start using off camera flash, we're going to assume that you have a camera. And that's about it. So you've got your camera.

It's a DSLR of some type that has a hot shoe or a mirrorless camera with a hot shoe. Either one is fine, as long as you have a hot shoe on your camera, this will work for you. Now, the first thing you need to do is get a stand. You need something to put the light on. So we don't need anything crazy. This is a really inexpensive stand.

That works pretty well. Is it the best stand on planet Earth. Not even close. Are you going to put a studio strobe on this thing now, but if you're going to use speed lights, which is what we use on location, and for a lot of our in indoor shoots as well, these are perfect. They travel easy, they fold up small, and they're really light. So this stand will run you about $12 I would recommend getting two of these to begin with.

If you need more, buy more. The nice thing is they're so cheap that if they do break, which I've actually not had one of them break on me yet and we've used numerous stands at a lot of events. You buy another one, I find this to be a lot more economical and effective than spending $120 per stand. Because if you lose it, if it gets stolen, if it gets damaged, you're at 120 bucks, you do one of these things, you replace it for less than 20. No big deal. So that's a light stand.

Now once you have a light stand, you've got to be able to put the light on top of it. But how do we do that? Well, you need one of these things. There's a lot of different ones out there. I've tried a few. I found these to be the best.

They are mostly all metal except for a couple of knobs, which is huge. If you're going to be using it over and over again, the durability factor is a big I've broken these before and I bought other ones that had a lot more plastic on them. And these are not very expensive at all. So what this does, is it allows you to swivel both this piece as well as the top piece. So you've got a two a double swivel point which my old ones didn't have. So this is really nice.

So this hot shoe right here is with a flash one up gone. We'll get to that. And this is the part that goes on the stand. So you mount this on the stand. And then you can swivel this in all sorts of different directions. And this hole right here will allow you to put an umbrella into which we'll also get to this is hugely important.

You want to have a hole to be able to mount an umbrella or other modifiers to it. So this goes on top of the stand. And in the next section, we'll put everything together. You'll see how that fits. Well, you'll want to grab yourself a couple of these to get started. Alright, so far so good.

Here's where it gets a little bit hairy. Now when you take a picture of the camera, you need a way for the camera to tell the flash that's not on your camera that you press the shutter button and you want it to fire. The best way is with a radio frequency trigger or an RF trigger. Now, here's a couple of them. And these are great cactus v five transceivers. And I use these things all the time and they never misfire.

You'll find with certain triggers that they don't fire all the time. I've tested these I've used these a ton. Awesome, never misfire, and really inexpensive. There's a lot of caveats to this. These triggers run about $75 for a pair roughly. You can buy much more More expensive triggers.

And they'll have a lot more functionality, but you don't necessarily need it. And because we're trying to build a practical light kit for a reasonable price, this is where I want to point you. And to be honest, this is all I use. I don't own more expensive triggers. I don't need those functions because as we'll talk about later on, I shoot completely manual all the time. So these triggers, you might hear people call them dumb triggers.

They're not trying to insult them It just means that there's no smarts in them and just tell your camera says the other one fire. That's the only thing in the more advanced ones, the ones that cost more money, you can use one of them to tell the other one what power to fire the flash on. Or to turn off completely or all sorts of things like that. These fire or don't fire that's it. That's all you control. Now, since I purchased these years ago, there have been new ones that came on the market by young new Oh, and those I would really recommend if you're gonna go dumb triggers, then these are great, but you can get the newest are cheaper.

And I do have some friends that use those other photographer friends. And they work really well too. And they're much, much cheaper. So if you're going to go this way, I'd say go with iOS, they have the same functionality and they're a lot less expensive. Alright, so we got a light stand we have our light mount and we have our triggers will be missing a light. So what's the best way to have a portable lighting system?

It's to use speed lights, and speed lights are small compact lights that run on battery power, as opposed to a studio strobe which is generally larger and needs AC power to run. I'm going to unapologetically recommend one speed light to you. And I would say buy as many as you feel like you need lights don't even bother with anything else. It is a young Newell why n 560 dashboard. The dashboard is the current version. They started on one, they had to they had three, they had four.

I've had the one I've had the two and I skipped the three and ended up with the four. These are awesome. This flash as of this video was $71, and it does everything you're going to need and is just as powerful as the flagship flashes that Canon and Nikon make, which would be the sb 910. At that moment, or I'm not actually even sure what canons is because I'm a Nikon shooter. These flashes are just as powerful $71 the flagship flashes for the Canon Nikon sell for 678 hundred dollars. So you can see the value in getting these.

When one of these falls on the floor and breaks and cost you $71 instead of $800. I promise you're gonna feel a lot better. I had one of the expensive flashes break because I started off and I didn't know any better. And I bought a Nikon flash. It was actually The lowest end flash they offered it was three or $400 at the time, came crashing down on the floor at a wedding. And it broke the flash to broke and the flash was dead and I was out three or $400.

And after that happened, I started to explore I said, This doesn't make sense. I can't buy a 400 ollar flash, every time this breaks and all this kind of thing. And I found these, I tell everybody to get these, these are the best thing going in photography of any piece of gear you can buy. Now, the thing that's awesome about the dash fours that is incredible 471 dollars is that inside of this flash is actually a built in trigger. So the triggers we talked about before the cat is V five. So the young news, you actually don't even need those if you buy wine 560 dash fours, because inside here is essentially a built in trigger.

So now you don't have to spend that money. All you have to do is have one of these on your camera. Any of the ones that are off camera you can control from this flash, not only can you control it by saying on or off, but you can set the power of those flashes from this flash. So even the functionality is more advanced in this than you would get with one of the dumb triggers. So this is like a total total no brainer by far five of these things and stick them in your bag and call it a day. So this is our flash.

And we'll talk about using this with and without the triggers in the latter part of the video because I actually still use the triggers because this is my only dash for my other ones are the dash two and the dash one and until those really die and I need to replace them. I'm not actually taking advantage of the wireless trigger built into the flash because they need to talk to other dashboards and I only have one but I have used it with other people's dashboards and it works beautifully. So that's our flash. This is our light source for double A batteries. They're right in there and This thing will fire all night long. We use them at weddings and I don't have to replace the batteries one time the entire night, which is really convenient.

And we'll talk more about that as well.