Choosing a strobe often comes down to one question: how versatile is it? Eli Infante put the Westcott FJ250 through three distinct setups in a single session to show exactly what it’s capable of, from soft beauty light to hard dramatic slices of light to a high-key silhouette build.<\/p>\n
Coming to you from Eli Infante<\/a>, this detailed video walks through each lighting configuration with a live model, showing the actual shot build-up and the decision-making behind every adjustment. The first setup is a two-light arrangement using the Westcott FJ250<\/a> with a beauty dish as the key light, paired with a V-flat on the opposite side to control shadow depth. A second FJ250 fitted with a 24-inch beauty dish and a grid serves as a dedicated fill for the lower half of the subject, evening out the skin tones on the legs without washing out the mood on the background. Infante also shows what happens mid-shoot when something isn’t quite right: he pulls up Capture One on a tethered monitor, decides the background is too light, and moves the model forward while repositioning every light to compensate.<\/p>\n The second setup is where things shift significantly. Infante swaps to an optical spot attachment on the FJ250 to produce hard light, using the spot’s built-in leaves to cut a precise slice of light across the subject. Hard light means harsh shadows, and rather than fighting them, he repositions the camera angle to make the shadow on the background part of the composition. He also introduces a star filter on the lens, which only activates visually when the light source is hard, making the sparkles on the subject’s dress and earrings pop in a way that soft light simply can’t produce. A second light in butterfly position fills the background to whatever brightness he wants without interfering with the key.<\/p>\n The third setup brings in three lights total: the optical spot again as a key, and two FJ250s behind the subject aimed at small umbrellas to build a bright, clean background. The subject moves toward silhouette territory, and Infante layers in a gradient lens filter that does something unexpected with the composition. He describes it as creating a foreground, middle ground, and background within a single frame, and the before-and-after comparison in the video makes the difference obvious. What stands out across all three setups is how much Infante adjusts in real-time rather than locking in a plan and executing it. The decisions he makes on the fly, and the reasoning behind each one, are what make the video worth watching closely. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Infante, including the complete before-and-after comparisons for each setup.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Choosing a strobe often comes down to one question: how versatile is it? Eli Infante put the Westcott…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-363744","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}