All right, so you put your order in, you waited too long days for Amazon Prime to get this stuff to your house. And then finally, all the boxes are on your doorstep. So you grab, bring them in your house, open them up, throw the packing material everywhere, and get really excited and then realize I have no idea how to hook this stuff up. So that's what we're here for. Let's put this all together. You're gonna start off with your light, Stan.

So get that thing out of the box. Loosen up this little knob up here and open the legs. Once you extend those out, you can turn that knob back down. Don't crank it too hard. It is a piece of plastic so it can break if you go nuts on it. And then you're going to open these little tabs right here and extend the telescoping arm.

Out so that you can increase the height of the lifespan, you have two of them, they get about seven feet tall. I don't need them all the way extended for this demo. So I'll put that down right there. So we ever like stand. Now, we need to put something on it. So we need a speed light now.

Take your speed light mail, and make sure that you unscrew this port enough so that the opening is big enough to fit right on top. And then you can crank this back down. And this is all metal. So you can use some muscle on that. And you want to make sure that your joints are all tightened down. So they're not going to flop over when you put something on top.

And now for the next part, you may or may not have triggers. If you bought the dash fours, which I recommend, you're not going to be putting the triggers on because they're built in. But for the sake of demo, and because I still use triggers. I'm going to do that. But you can skip this step if you have the dashboards and you're not using triggers. So on top of the speedlight mount is it's what's called A cold shoe.

And it's called the cold shoe because it's just like a hot shoe except there's no electronics, it's just the mechanical part. And on top of the trigger, or rather on the bottom is the piece that mounts into the hot shoe or a coal chute anyway, but on and so that just slides right in. And then once you do that, you can crank down this little screw on the side. Now, I'll show this to you. It's got a flathead slot. Now I have this awesome thing that I got from Amazon as well which is a key chain flathead and a key chain Phillips head screwdriver, and I'll put a link to it.

But it's really handy for stuff like this because when you want to make this tighter than you can with your fingers, just stick that Flathead in there and crank it down so that you make sure this doesn't go anywhere. So once you do that, the next step is getting your flash on there. And let me just show you on top of the trigger is a hot shoe. And that's where the flash goes. I'm gonna bring this down just a little bit. Okay.

On the bottom of your flash is a hot shoe mount. So this just slides in like building a big tower of hot shoes and clothes shoes, but put that on and there's a circular disc on the bottom on the flash and you turn that clockwise and then it'll crank down and you'll feel it get tight and the flash isn't gonna go anywhere and the flash head swivels around and you're generally going to keep it in this direction. So this is our light setup, with no modifier. If you want to put an umbrella in which I recommend you take your umbrella and open it up. Again, you'll see me after this but and you put that right through the hole that's in the stand and tighten that down. Let me turn this around.

There we go. So I'll do that again so you can see it so right into the hole and tying this out and in the same way that this has a flat head on it, this does as well. And this you really want to crank down tight. If you're going to be outdoors and there's even a little bit of wind, and even indoors, it really doesn't hurt, get that screwdriver in there and crank this tight so this umbrella doesn't come out of the hole and go flying around because I have had that happen before. So now we are set up. And this is a standalone flash system.

And this can be placed anywhere you need light and we'll talk about what an optimal placement is and all that kind of thing a little bit later on. But for now this is the setup on your camera. If you're using triggers, then you would put another trigger on top of your hot shoe. If you're just using the dash fours and you don't need an external trigger, then you're going to put another flash on top of your camera because that's going to be your control unit. That'll allow your camera to talk to your flash setup that you've got. And you can have one of these somewhere or you can have 20 of these.

It Does not matter, you can scale this up to do shoots with tons of flashes if you're really needed for some crazy reason. That's the beauty of this. And this setup is really only about $130 with everything maybe 150. And that is so cheap for the stand and the mountain, the trigger and the flash and the umbrella. And you're good to go. So you can see how if you wanted to have like a four light setup, it's not really that expensive.

$600 Lead and you've got four lights, four stands for umbrellas for triggers. And you're good to go. You can do anything with four lights, anything except maybe like an airplane, I mean, but for normal portrait shoots and weddings and things like that for is more than enough. We generally only use two. And that's usually perfect. And if we're just doing a couple shoot or something like that one is perfect.

So that is the setup. And the only missing piece now is how do you use it. So that's what we'll talk about next.