It’s not that I’m against constant lighting or LED lighting, but we can all agree that several of them lack magic. When you’re shooting a photo and the pop of the flash goes off, something happens to the hero of your photo. Suddenly, you’re making something that the human eye can’t see. Much of playing with LED lights involved looking and not seeing — and if you’re an artistic photographer, you’ll understand where I’m getting to with that. Recently, the Hobolite Avant made me realize that a good LED or constant light can help you do both.
What’s been missing from constant lights is magic. By that, I mean a je ne sais quoi that is experienced more than just through the final image. The tool needs to be something that holistically works with you to inspire you to make better images. It should bring you excitement every time you pick it up. Being a low-vision photographer, I’ve realized this more and more. I hear it in the words of everyone who swears by their Ricoh GR camera. With them, it’s not about the tech, it’s about the experience. The conversation is far different from what I hear from Sony bros, Fuji fanboys, and generic Canon shooters. This, instead, is more about the art — which is what you hear from Leica shooters.
In that way, the Hobolite Avant is something more akin to a Leica of LED lights. They’re small, insanely well built, have a nice heft to them, and include settings and attachments that make them very fun to shoot with. Screwing it onto a light stand is a process that intentionally makes you think carefully about it instead of making the process brainless. That’s because of the design of the mount — which can also attach to equally well-built grip gear that Hobolite provides. Truthfully, it feels like something that I’d find in the buy-it-for-life sub-reddit.
The knobs and buttons of the Hobolite Avant all remind me of retro-devices. They remind of the early 90s when my immigrant parents had a television that didn’t even have a remote control. Instead, we’d need to walk up to it, turn knobs, press buttons, etc. But the Hobolite Avant doesn’t have bunny ear antennas for radio control. However, there is Bluetooth built-in.
Truly, though, when working with this light, I really want to get up close with it and work with it. Using the bluetooth is a means to an end that removes the tactile operation. It’s similar to shooting a photo with your phone vs a dedicated camera. A dedicated camera is a completely different hardware-based tactile operation. And truly, I get joy out of operating the product by turning the knobs, pressing the buttons, etc. I enjoy that there isn’t a touchscreen because the entire experience is supposed to feel really retro.
And really, that’s what I want. When I work with something, I want to be motivated by the tools that I use. When I chop vegetables in my kitchen, I enjoy using my Victorinox knives — which aren’t pricey but are really sturdy while feeling great. I purposely write poetry in cursive with either Montblanc or Lamy pens because of the entire tactile feeling. The keyboard I’m typing this article on is a Das Keyboard, and it beats the crap out of Apple’s own keyboards. The sensory experince really helps me become closer to what I’m making.
Part of what makes the Hobolite Avant so fun are the preset lighting patterns. There’s one that mimics the look of flames, flashes, etc. It helps add some mystery to your images and allows for creative accidents to happen that add to the fun factor of it all. Sometimes, those can be the best images.
My inspiration for working with LEDs, however, came from an idea that I wanted to play with for a while. Several years ago, we interviewed photographer Clement Morin about his Light Spirits photos. It gave me an idea to work with shadow puppets and shadows in general. I’ve always found shadows so beautiful in the way that they can tell a story without being too obvious. Instead, they’ll lead our mind to think about something instead. The Hobolite Avant, with its flame setting and modular color setting, helped me figure this out a bit more.
The light comes with barn doors which help you really direct the lighting the way that you would on a movie set. So after setting up some shadow puppets that I got from Amazon really cheaply, I did some multiple exposure work in-camera with the Canon EOS R. Then I edited the images to have a black and white, gritty, noir feel to them. The images feel a tad creepy though also a bit fun.
I’ve truly never had an experience with an LED light like I have with the Hobolite Avant. They’re far more affordable than Profoto lights and have a lot of tactile beauty to them. Yet at the same time, I wish they made a flash that can deliver on the magic that Profoto’s strobes can make.