City Lights Shoot with the Weeylite K21 Light stick and the Fuji GFX 100s
Weeylite sent me two of their new LED K21 Light sticks and I needed to try them out. Also, it’s been ages since I did a shoot just for fun and trying out new things. Now I took some time and planned a little city lights shoot in the evening here in Salzburg with the new Light Sticks. My friend Mariana joined as a second photographer, and she also organized the model, which was also called Mariana. My colleague Hartwig also joined, to shoot some BTS video content (check out the video below).
Disclaimer: Weeylite provided me with two units of the K21 LED Light Stick for testing and creative purposes.
Here, a few initial thoughts about the Weeylite K21 LED Light Sticks:
- Battery performance seems great, we played with them an hour, and we lost around 30% of battery. But we only used around 30–50% of max power.
- The different settings are awesome: Change the HSL to get the colour you want, change colour temperature, you can also set up different modes like police car, bonfire, party, etc.
- It’s magnetic, that was a very pleasant surprise. So you can just attach it to anything metal, and they hold pretty strong.
- The light is also very compact & portable, with its size of 300 mm x 40 mm and 270g you can put in every side corner of your backpack.
- They are fun to use, but you have to get used to the little menu on the stick.
- The only downside right now is, why is there no bigger second option. The stick is fun for small & simple portrait sessions, but if you wanna light a bigger scene they are just too weak. There is a chance to screw three of those together, but that’s just going to be annoying as hell. I hope Weeylite will produce a 600 mm or 900 mm version too.
So about the shoot, we went to the Kapuzinerberg mountain in Salzburg and hoped for a good sunset, unfortunately it was very cloudy that day. For this shoot, I chose my Fujifilm GFX 100s with the 45 mm f2.8 and the 80 mm f1.7 lens. Since I got this camera pretty recently, I want to try it out more, to see how it performs under different circumstances. We shot the first few photos without the lights.
After we grooved in a bit, we started to play with the lights. It also got darker too, so the effect was better.
After that, we did a small location change and I started to use both lights more, here classic with red & blue light scheme. Also, I wanted a washed out / vintage look and feel for the photos, that’s why I added some light leaks, scratches and blur in Photoshop. Color Grading was done in Lightroom. If you want to see more photos, check out the YouTube video below:
