[Music] In this episode we'll take a look at the Aputure Light Dome III.

It is a circular, quick-fold Bowens mount softbox.

So it can go on any sort of light that has a Bowens mount and that's going to be a ton of Aputure lights, Amaran lights, lights from Godox, lots of other manufacturers.

And of course what a softbox does is it makes the light softer.

It makes it wrap around the face a little bit more.

It generally looks better for lighting faces.

Now I've used the Light Dome II for about five years.

It's been a great softbox. It's held up really well. There are maybe a few stress tears in it, but it's still very usable.

I'm very happy with it. It's been really good. This new version is supposed to set up faster and give you all the same great qualities of that previous Light Dome.

So let's take a closer look and see what's new in this particular version.

Now the big new thing, of course, is that it's much faster to set up.

Now, the Light Dome II was faster to set up than the Light Dome I, where you had to actually take each of the individual 16 spokes on the mount and get them into their spots.

With the new version, you could just snap them into place and that was faster.

In this one you actually literally just put the front of the softbox down on a floor or on a tabletop, you press down until it snaps into place, and when you release it, it basically packs flat. That Bowens mount kind of folds in half, which is really, really nice.

So that makes it even faster to get it up and in place.

Now I worried at first that that setup approach could be pretty rough on the fabric on the front of the box, and I don't- I think it's going to be okay.

I would choose a surface that's clean and pretty smooth and that won't put a lot of stress or, like, grind the fabric into dirt or anything like that, to set it up but with that, I think it'll hold up pretty nicely. Time will tell. Spec-wise, the front of the softbox is circular.

It's a three-foot diameter, 90 millimeters, roughly, 32-side circular design with 16 different rods. So it's really nice because it's round and that means that the catch light in people's eyes- when you're lighting faces- is going to be round as well, which is a really nice look. And as I mentioned before, this, like the previous generation, uses a Bowens mount.

There are tons of lights out on the market that use Bowens mounts, both from Aputure,

Amaran, and other manufacturers. Now, the kit includes the Light Dome III itself; two different diffusion panels, a one-stop and a two-stop. So the one-stop is going to let more light through but won't diffuse the light quite as much, and then there's the two-stop which lets less light through.

You may need a more powerful light, but it diffuses the light a little bit more.

So in this particular case we're using the two-stop diffusion panel here with the Aputure 600x Pro, and we have the dimmer set to 25%.

We're at f2.8, ISO 800, 23.976 frames per second, 180 degree shutter angle.

So roughly a hundred and- or, roughly a 1/48th of a second shutter speed.

So that's what you can expect in this particular case.

In the light here, the front of the panel is about... just over a meter from my face right here. It also comes with a 40 degree grid which you can put on the front of the diffusion panel, and what that does is it keeps the light from spilling everywhere so it's nice because you can control where the light goes.

It's a- it's a really useful tool and I have that on there almost all the time when I'm doing this low-key kind of lighting here.

Now if I want the light to spill, I want to fill the space a little bit more and have the light bouncing around a little bit more, I'll take that grid off and that can be really useful as well. It also comes with a carrying bag and it is priced at the time of this review at $220

US. So let's do a little comparison here.

I think one of the biggest questions people ask is, well, the Light Dome versus the Light

Dome Mini versus something else?

So here we're going to compare three different things: the Light Dome Mini II, which is the version of the Light Dome that I have; the Light Dome III, which is the bigger one that we're talking about here; plus a 4x4 silk.

This is a Chimera on a 4-foot by 4-foot frame, and you just shoot the light through it.

So that's a bigger surface than the Light Dome III.

Now you can see with the light at the exact same distance from me- 2 meters from my face- that the 4x4 silk is the softest and the Light Dome Mini is probably the hardest.

Now the nice thing about the Light Dome III is that it's kind of somewhere in the middle, which I really like for talking head video because the light will wrap around the face but you still get some mottling of the face. You still get some shadow on the side of the face farthest from the light.

So it gives a little bit more dimension to the overall look and it's a really good look for talking head videos. Now I'm not here to say that the Light Dome Mini is not the right mix, or the right light modifier for some people. I think it actually can be really helpful, but let me kind of talk about what I think is ideal: Light Dome III, probably best for head and shoulders talking head from my point of view, if you want a little more dimension. If you want something that looks more natural, like an actual space, that's where I think the 4x4 silk looks more natural.

It wraps even more. It's like a big window in somebody's house and it's a really good look.

They're using tons of these in TV shows and films; you'll find a ton of 4x4's and even bigger diffusion on sets there.

So that's a look. It's a valid look. It's a little bit different. Then, the Light Dome Mini, I think, can be really useful if you're in a very, very tight space and also your framing on the camera is pretty tight.

If it's a- like, just a head and even less- less- a tighter frame than what we're doing here and you can put the Light Dome just barely out of the frame you can still get a pretty soft look, and that's where that's going to work really well.

Again, if you have a very small space that you're working in, that Light Dome Mini is a good choice. So overall, for $220, the Light Dome III to me seems like a really fair price first of all for what for me has been a staple of my lighting designs.

I use it so often. I can't even... 90-some percent of my videos where we're doing talking head, that's in use here.

It's fantastic because as a Bowens mount, you can use it on a light from a lot of different manufacturers and it stays on the stand with the light 90 percent of the time here in this studio. So I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below. If you've not already subscribed make sure you do that, and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video.

Talk to you soon.