The New Lighting Kit. How Magmod and Radio Flashes Changed the Game for Me
2019 Update: Want a discount? Use ‘TACO’ to get $1o off any MagMod purchase. Want to see what my kit looks like two years later? Head to my follow-up post, here.
The Starting Point
Pictured above is my entire lighting kit, sans two light stands, one umbrella and one Westcott Ice Light, but that’s in for service getting a new battery (unlike the new ones that have a pretty sweet interchangeable battery). I’m almost upset that you can’t hear my excitement in the text of this. So before I jump into what changed, it’s important to mention what I had. My old lighting kit was:
2x Nikon SB-700 Speedlights
1x Nikon SU-800 CLS Commander
2x Phottix Strato II receivers
1x Phottix Strato II transmitter
Also, I had three Ziploc bags of gels (that I hand cut, bringing back an awful feeling of dread that I haven’t had since a middle school science project) and a grid that stayed on my flash roughly as well as my two-year-old stays out of a bag of gummy bears unsupervised. I don’t have a picture of the grid. I think I threw it into the ocean during a shoot in a glorious fit of rage… like an adult. Grand total: $1,140
Right, so in order for me to use a flash in an off-camera situation, which on a wedding day usually equates to once or twice for portraits, introductions and dancing for the reception, and maybe some night time portraits, I had to take a lot of time to get ready (let alone the limitations on how I could shoot). A typical portrait session was my throwing one flash and a trigger to my assistant, throwing a bag of modifiers over my shoulder and heading outside where we would scream back and forth at each other about adjusting flash power and a good two-minute setup every time we changed a modifier. I will say, I do miss watching my poor assistant try to hold a flash, unroll two pieces of gaff tape, and fight with a stack of unlabeled gels in the dark. I don’t have a video, but that’s only because he threatened me, so just use your imagination, it’ll be great I swear.
What Changed
After waiting for Nikon to finally release a radio flash system, and being thoroughly underwhelmed when they did, (Y’all still win this round, Canon users) I finally made the jump to a different system. I tried the Yongnuo’s, watched them fail a few too many times and looked for some other options. After watching some awesome photographers use the Shanny system, I decided to make the jump in that direction. They had the capability for High-Speed Sync and TTL which was a must have for me. (I rarely use TTL, but in certain situations, it’s handy to have ready.) It is worth mentioning that a few friends have switched to the Godox system which is treating them well. If I get a hands-on opportunity, I may do a write up at one point. That said, I went with four Shanny SN910EX-RF speedlights for my base and some Magmod gear per the recommendations (bordering on bullying) of almost every photographer I know. Seriously. I was starting to feel a lot like that time in grade school that I didn’t have a cool slammer and everyone played pogs without me. It was heartbreaking.
Anyway.. The kit I picked up to start was:
4x Shanny SN910EX-RF
1x MagMod basic kit
1x MagGrip
1x MagGrid
1x MagSnoot
1x MagMod Creative Gel Kit
1x MagMod Artistic Gel Kit (Currently Out of Stock)
Total: $1,027
So if you’re tracking at this point, in just speedlights alone, I went from 2 flashes to four, AND now I’m completely radio. No transmitters, no-nonsense. I also went from one kind of crappy modifier to four, with an unlimited combination of gels AND I even had some cash left over for tacos, because.. well, you know, who doesn’t want tacos.
Now. This is the point where I need to be brutally honest with you. There are people that are more skilled with flash than me. I’m okay with it. This is simply my side of how the combination of these flashes and these modifiers dramatically changed the game for me in less than one week’s worth of shooting. Now that we’ve got that covered, let’s jump into the modifiers and what’s come of it. Sorry, I realize that sounded like a weird weight loss pitch. Shanny flashes won’t make you lose weight. Maybe MagMods will. I think I saw that on their website somewhere on the ‘MagMods are more magical than unicorns’ page. Keep an eye out for it.
The Snoot
Okay, obviously we have to start here because ‘Snoot’ is fun to say. Go on say it. I’ll wait. Snoooooooot. Heh. Right, so the MagSnoot is pretty much the scalpel of the speedlight. It gives me the ability to say, “I want light RIGHT here and ONLY right here.” I haven’t had a ton of chances to use this one yet, but here’s a shot I took of a groom getting ready where I didn’t want light anywhere but his face.
The Grid
Now that you’ve hopefully stopped saying ‘snooooooot’ over and over again, let’s get to the modifier I’ve definitely gotten the most mileage out of so far, The MagGrid. So the general idea behind a grid is pretty straightforward, it simply removes light that would otherwise go sideways, and gives a more focused feel to where your light is aimed. One of the things that prevented me from using flash originally in my work was that every time I set up a Speedlight, light would just go everywhere, it would look awful, and I’d feel awful. (Yes, my pictures were bad, so I should feel bad). The addition of the MagGrid to my kit has changed my work. I’m not just saying that they’re certainly not paying me for this (although if they want to, I’m all ears). The MagGrid gives me the option to walk into any room and put light exactly where I want it and nowhere else, with the flick of a magnet.
Here you can see that I was balancing the lights in the train station, a quickly fading sunset and now an off-camera flash. Took my first shot (the silhouette), had my assistant throw on a grid, aimed it up at them and within 31 seconds (yes I checked the time stamps) I have two completely different images that my clients adored. 
Here’s a few more from Jacki and Brad’s Hoboken Engagement Photos that were all taken with one gridded speedlight.
The image below is a piano that the bride wanted to take pictures by. I’d usually rather not do something like this, but what the client says goes, and the answer here was as simple as posing them, taking one ‘safe shot’ so we had what they were asking for, and then throwing a gridded flash in front of them to kill everything else but the moment between them, which is much more my style.
This shot was taken at the same wedding on the dance floor while no one else was watching. Gridded light on them, a little bit of selective burning in post-production, and boom. One extra portrait that they loved, completely unscripted.
This one just needed a touch of light in exactly the right spot so a gridded speedlight to fill in the shadows on their face worked perfectly.
Now that we’ve covered some portraits, I think the best use of the grid is for the reception. A lot of reception rooms, like the one below, look beautiful when we walk in, and rather than destroy the color and light that’s already there, I love that the MagGrid allows me the ability to add only the light I want, exactly where I want it.
Here’s a perfect example of putting the light exactly where I wanted it. This wedding I was shooting with a friend, so I didn’t have my usual assistant, but one MagGrid on a light stand allowed me to frame my shot and wait for that perfect moment where the groom would lock eyes with his bride the way he had been all day.
Here’s another moment on the dance floor, and if you’re a photographer I hope you’re at least a little impressed with my fortune here as at the end of the first dance, the groom dipped the bride PERFECTLY in my light. The ‘dip’ shot is kind of worn out, we know, but getting it in the frame I was set up for, with my off camera lights set for a zone like this, felt like a victory I can’t describe. And if you’re wondering why I would take a risk like that on a wedding day, we had a second shooter on this wedding and they had the safe shot.
Here are a few more examples of the MagGrid used in a reception
The Gels
Okay, so I have to nerd out for a second here. The fact that I have over 20 gels (I think it’s 24 but counting isn’t always my forte and I’m tired) at my disposal and none of them require a frustrated assistant, gaff tape, or magic rituals trying to patch together some saran wrap level nonsense that got wrapped together still blows my mind. Like, Bruce Willis is actually a dead person, blows my mind. Sorry, that’s the best pop culture reference I have. I don’t get out much… but my two-year-old and I can make a mean pillow fort, and I think we know what really matters.
Now that we know that I make a better pillow fort than you, these things are a must have for a wedding photographer. The ease of use and ability to completely transform a situation is worth the price of the full MagMod kit. The shot immediately below was one the groom asked for. He and his guys were enjoying some nice cigars out back and my options were either, A- patio full of guests, B- dark and spooky golf course, or C- white wall. Obviously, we went with C.
There are a few things I’d change about this shot, sure. From a photographer’s standpoint, I would like less red on their faces, and I would have shot much more compressed. The situation didn’t allow for it, and weddings don’t give you do-overs, so here we are. A shot that I and the groom are both happy with. This is one ‘rose’ gel from the artistic gel pack behind the guys and one gridded speedlight off camera right aimed at the groom. This shot blew their mind when they saw it, and at the end of the day, the only reason ANY of us do this job is to have a happy client.
Here’s another example of using the MagGels to create something that wasn’t quite there yet. Sunset was a good hour and a half away when we were shooting this, but I wanted it to have a late in the day sort of feel. 1/2 CTO gel placed outside the window aiming in, boom, sunset.
Even after taking a safe shot before this with the white, I wanted to mix up the shot a bit. I had my assistant hold down some weird water fountain thing we stumbled upon and I put a red MagGel on the other side of it to make the foreground a touch more interesting. I also wound up getting some of the Hudson River on my face in the process, so if I do wind up with some weird growth on the side of my head, please still be my friend?
The last of the set, this bride chose her venue because it had a meaning close to the couple, so when it rained she felt a bit devastated. I waited on Dark Sky (iPhone weather app) to tell me that there would be a break in the rain, and we went out and set this up. There is one flash with an Orange Gel behind them letting me match the color coming from the building, and one gridded flash to the camera’s left of the couple (I left part of my light stand in the shot so you can see it if you look closely). As soon as she saw the picture on the back of my camera her first words were “Oh, I’m so happy we came out here”. Mission accomplished.
In Conclusion
I travel quite a lot for weddings. To date, I’ve shot in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, DC, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oregon, and the ‘Jersey Shore’, (which I’m sorry, is a land of its own). Switching to a system designed around being portable opens opportunities for me, and the combination of the Shanny flashes and the MagMod kit has remedied almost all of my hesitancy with flash. In one week of having the MagMods and Shannys, I went from primarily using the Yongnuo 600 LED (nicknamed ‘The Sun’ pictured with the flashes above) and the Westcott Ice Light, to incorporating flash so heavily into my workflow that out of all of my images from two engagement sessions, it was almost a 50/50 split between using flash and not. You couple that with the fact that the entire kit fits in two slots of my Thinktank Airport Security V 2.0, and I’ve now got a game-changing Off Camera Flash setup that’s ready to take on anything, anywhere.