Light and Motion advertises their line of Stella Pro lights with phrases like: “travels anywhere” and “perfect for mobile production crews and independent filmmakers”. The benefits of lights like these for a traveling filmmaker is the fact they are waterproof, have a 90+ minute built in battery, are drop resistant, and pack a punch, pushing out 1000 to 8000 Lumens , making them plenty bright enough to use during the day. All this in a package the size of a 40oz beer can.
Traditionally, taking lights, including LEDs, has presented challenging issues for my productions, such as durability, power consumption, weight, size, and the capability of being set up and torn down quickly. After breaking many LED panels, our team has resorted to just buying cheap ones from Amazon, dealing with the color issues in post and considering lights to be “disposable”… until now…
I took this series of lights to cover the aftermath and recovery efforts of Hurricane Harvey in the British Virgin Islands and ended up riding out Hurricane Maria while still there. Soon after, I headed to Bangladesh for the Rohingya refugee crisis and, most recently, to South Sudan to film and observe food and supply air drops. Between my travels and Stella’s website, here’s what I learned:
The core lineup has 5 lights. A 1000, 2000, 5000 RF, 8000 RF, and 10000. Each light has a 120 degree shooting angle, and when bought as part of the action pack, they come with barn doors, a diffuser, and a beam modifier. The 8000 RF & 10000 have fans, due to the high output, and are water resistant, not waterproof. The 10000 was slightly overkill for my line of work, so I didn’t take it on my trips. Brian Hallett did a great review of these lights last year, in which he explains the different models and how he used them in the more traditional settings.
Three lights fit into a small Tenba “BYOB” style camera insert bag, along with all the light modifiers and chargers needed to charge the lights. With the limitation of only two checked bags, getting my tripod, lights, drone, clothes, sleeping bag, chargers, water filter, and some food, these lights packed down great and were just thrown into my duffle bag.
With the lack of roads in places like South Sudan and Bangladesh we often times will to carry everything up to a mile for a shot. We simply toss the light with a stand into a backpack with our other gear, carry it to our location, set it on the stand and do the shoot. The lights are submersible to 100 meters, so after a shoot we would find some water, dunk the light to cool it off, toss it back in my backpack and run to the next location.
In South Sudan, the lights were in 110 to 115 degree heat for days on end and worked great and held up in the heat. I think I suffered more than the lights did.
Wrapping my head around the charging process and power adapters took a while compared to conventional LED and hot lights. Once I figured out the charging process, I could see the level of genius from the engineers. Each fixture comes with an adapter that plugs into the back of the light. Because these lights are water proof, the adapter is kind of funny looking, hugging the light to make contact with the exposed electrodes. These adapters then have about 3 inches of cable before to goes to another connector which you can then connect with a traditional AC adapter, car charging adapter, or P-tap (gotta love P-tap!). You can mix and match it whatever way you want based off your power source. The 1000 and 2000 lights use one size of power adapter and the 5000 and 8000 use another size. We ended up tossing 2 of the p-taps, one car charger, and 2 AC power adapters into our kit. Charging the lights was the tricky part because we only had a few hours to charge everything at night using a generator. However the lights charge extremely fast, so they were never the item we were waiting on to finish charging. Each light lasts around 90+ min using the internal battery. This makes it pretty easy to just toss the light up, turn it on, and done. No finding your Sony battery or gold pate batteries, no connecting them, nothing.
I do not want to give up these lights. They traveled with me across the world into very horrible conditions and the only real complaint I have is that I wish there was a universal charger for the lights. Seriously! These things are great!
Lightweight, built in batteries, drop resistant, water proof, and amazing light quality. These lights are products that I will be using for years to come!
