Curiosity

I get a little deep for this first episode of the Monday Morning Cup of Mo and ask the question: Are you naturally curious? Or has your curiosity waned under the weight of adulthood? Let's reengage that curiosity as it is vital to learning and so much more.

Also in the Godox and MoLight news section of this episode: I provide details on the new Godox M600D 740w LED as well as the next evolution of the Golden Eagle LED2000.

Please like and follow the podcast Facebook page and join my Facebook group.

Transcript

female announcer: 0:03

Live from mo lights studios in the heartland of America, it's your Monday morning jolt of hot photography tips with a frothy topping of the latest product news from Godox. Mo light and more. Welcome to the Monday morning cup of Mo with your host, the man who put the MO in MoLight Michael Mowbray.

Michael Mowbray: 0:29

Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning cup of Mo the podcast that asks, Do you need another podcast? And the answer is? Absolutely. As the nice lady said up front, I am your host, Michael Mowbray but who am I? That's an existential question, isn't it? Who am I? Who are we? Really? Who are you? I don't know. To quote my favorite maid of honor wedding speech. For those of you who don't know me, if you've ever photographed a wedding, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Because that's the way every maid of honor speech starts. But you know what, we don't need to go there if you don't know who I am. And why the hell are you here? How did you find this? Anyway, if you don't know who I am used use the Google. We don't need to rehash my bio here have been there, done that got the t shirt and all that kind of stuff. So the idea here is we're going to grab a cup of coffee together. And we're going to get this thing started. So I have so many ideas for topics for this. And that's that's one of the main reasons why I decided to do this because I've got all this stuff to say, but which one to pick for the first episode? Do we talk lighting? Do we talk technical? Now, let's get deep. And let's get a little existential. We can talk about how to use hard lightning in time or the best way to use a beauty dish or where should you put your nightstand? And what settings should you put on your Sony a seminar three, all that kind of stuff? No, I, I want to talk about deeper things from time to time. It's a big reason I felt driven to do this podcast, it's gonna give me a chance to share what's on my mind. And hopefully, hopefully, what I'm thinking will resonate with some of you and hopefully most of you and will help you out in some way. So hopefully, it'll help you with your business, maybe in your art, maybe in life in general. So what's that first topic? Our first topic is curiosity. I'm a big fan of the show Ted lasso on Apple TV. If you haven't seen it yet, put it on your binge list. It really is that good. It's very funny. The acting is spectacular, but it goes beyond like your standard sitcom. It goes a lot deeper than that, and the writing the actors give it depth. Without giving away too many spoilers in the first season. My favorite episode, the main character, Ted lasso talks about curiosity. He mentions Walt Whitman's famous quote, be curious, not judgmental. For my show today, I'm going to shorten that up to simply say, be curious. Okay, let's be curious. And how can you be more curious in your life? Or in your photography business? Since this is primarily a podcast about professional photography? What can you do to pique your curiosity in your art or in your business? Or what can you do to unlock your curiosity? Give that a thought for a moment. I'm going to sip a little bit more coffee. So why did I choose this topic? Partially because I'm naturally curious myself. I always seeking information and knowledge. If you know me, I'm always reading stuff. And I can pin much of my success to the fact that I am curious. But that's just about me. Let's talk about you. Maybe what I do doesn't apply to you. Maybe it does. Let me share a little bit. And hopefully, you can glean something from it. So the first question I would ask is, are you curious? Do you consider yourself a curious person? Maybe it's curiosity about how to create a certain lighting look or curiosity about how TTL works, or if TTL is something you could use a master? And this isn't about TTL today, but I'm just using that as an example. Or what would it be like to just exclusively photograph seniors or headshots? Or what would it take to open your own studio? I've often said in my teaching, the minute you stop learning is the minute you start to regress and lose ground to your competition. Actually, I believe my quote should be more harsh than that. The second you stop learning is the second you start to die. Whoa, whoa, whoa, this is turned dark didn't know. Honestly, really. This is a lifelong learning opportunity. Actually, you know what, let's take a deeper than that. Life, in general is a learning opportunity to constantly learning constantly learning from other people from your environment. From TV and movies and books and podcasts and all that kind of stuff. The second you stop learning is the second you start to die. I really do believe that. And as I get older, and hopefully I get wiser I've become well, yeah, I've come to believe the root of learning is curiosity. You have to have curiosity, in order to continue to drive you to learn. Here's another angle to that. One that drove me to write down this as a topic possibility. When I, when I was thinking, You know what, we should launch the show, as a podcast, I see an experience way too many folks who want everything spoon fed to them. How does this work? Which button do I push? Is there a video for how to set up this light stand? Why don't we have to take this and you unscrew this and you put it up? I mean, you know, it's that easy. Or I see a lot of people who crowdsource everything on Facebook, it's like they want everybody else to make the decisions for them. Man, really, I don't get that I really don't get that I see these questions about what camera should I buy? What softbox works with an 8200, and so on. Look, you know, I do enjoy helping people is one of the reasons why I teach. It's one of the main reasons I started MoLight. But that enjoyment does get diminished when I feel like the person on the other side isn't even trying to learn anything on their own. Sometimes it requires reading the manual, probably heard me harp about that before, if you know me, but you know what I do the first time I get some new gear, whether it's for myself, or it's a new product for MoLight. And let's be honest, every new product I get from MoLight is something for my for myself, too. So I opened up the box and I play with the gear, I don't even crack the manual to start off with, I want to see if the lighting gear or whatever it is, is intuitive. Number one, I want to see if it's, you know, easy for somebody to just kind of pick up if they know what they're doing a little bit, you know, easy to pick up and figure out how to use. And I start to play with the gear and I begin to learn how it works intuitively by being curious, like, what does this button do? What what happens if I do this? Huh, boy, how do I turn on the modeling light? Where do I find this? Where do I find that let's go through the manual menu. Let's see what all the different things in the menu are, you know, I do that. And I start to learn what this thing is about. And I'm using my own curiosity to help build my knowledge base on how to use this particular piece of gear by being curious. And then maybe I encounter a challenge, like I can't figure out how something works or what buttons, maybe there's a button combination I need to do or what menu is this, this particular thing. And if anybody's ever shot with a Sony camera, by the way, holy cow stuff is all over the place in the menu. So in that case, I kind of did go on YouTube and a few places, a few blogs to find some of the best, best setups for the camera and some of the best ways to find where certain things are. But that's again, part of curiosity and learning on your own. So if I do hit a challenge, so the first thing I do is I will open up the manual, and I'll read through it. And even if I don't hit a challenge, I will crack that manual. Because I want to know as much as I can about this gear because you know why I'm a professional photographer. And this gear is part of my livelihood. And there's an expectation that I need to or that I will know everything there is to know about my gear because I've got to get the job done. I can't be on location in front of clients, and not know how to do something that's death. So there is an expectation there. It's an expectation that I put on myself. But more importantly, it's an expectation that our clients and our marketplace put on us. So I want to know, everything I can about a piece of gear, because if I run into a problem in the field, I want to know how to troubleshoot it. So you know, I'll do that by playing with the gear. I'll do that by reading the manual. And then maybe I'll go to the Google as I like to call it the gulags and I'll find additional information, or I'll find a video because I'm still curious. Maybe somebody else has found a different way of using this particular piece of gear to do something. Okay, that's all part of curiosity. What I don't do and this is me personally, and you know, maybe I'm wrong. I don't go on the Facebook and go How do I use this? Maybe that's pride probably is pride. So I don't want anybody to think I don't know how to use something. So I use that. To drive me to learn how to use everything, every piece of gear I have to the best of my ability. So maybe a price goal for 2022. I'm just suggesting is to engage or reengage your curiosity. Curiosity may have killed the cat. Oh, I think you're probably smarter than that cat, right? Be more curious. Okay. Thank you for joining in on this first podcast episode. It's not done yet. I'll be back in just a moment with the latest news from Godox and MoLight. So sit tight. And here's the latest news from Godox and MoLight. Godox recently announced a beast of an LED that will hit the market soon. It's called the M 600. D. why it's called that I don't know, because it's a 740 watt cob style LED and what does cob style mean? cob stands for chip on board CLB, which means there's one larger LED chip in the front of a model light style LED. LED panels, on the other hand, have hundreds or 1000s of little small LED bulbs. It's two different ways they create LEDs. So this is a cob style is is a little bit more like you know MoLight. So if you're used to like a studio flash, it's it's kind of built that same kind of way. It's not flash though. It's a continuous light source. So 740 watts of power will deliver an amazing 15,700 Lux at three meters. What's that mean? It's stinking bright. But wait, there's more. Godox is introducing a Fernell lens designed specifically for this. It's called the F ls 10 f l s 10. And it will boost the effective light output to get this 46,400 Lux at three meters. That's like melt your face power. That's like Steven Spielberg puts this in the Ark of the Covenant and Raiders of the lark. Lark. Raiders of the Lost Ark power. That's yeah, yeah, we can melt some Nazis with this thing. Finally, is this the ultimate portrait LED that allow you to use lower ISOs and smaller apertures? No, not really, in my opinion. This is really gear for commercial shooters and video production. Could you use it for portraits? Yes, and let's talk a little bit about this. But if you set this up in a standard portrait setting with your key light, like five or six feet away, your subject won't be able to open their eyes at full power on this. So I just want to be clear about this. It's an amazing astounding light. But it has a different purpose than classic studio portraiture. Because 740 Watch is like wow, wait a second. That's not that more than like an 8600 nodes entirely different animal a flash takes that power. And we talked about in watt seconds how much power it's got to use. And it takes that and stores up that energy and boom, throws it out there in a quick burst of light, okay, and LED on the other hand, is continuous that takes that power and it has to drive that LED chip and it's going to throw light out the whole time people can't take that much light, they really can't what I have found in practice because I use LEDs a lot is that most light that the typical person can take as about a 300 watt LED maybe a little bit more and that's I'm talking in standard studio portrait like headshots setting. Now if you're going to pull that way back and you're trying to throw light like 30 feet, okay, we're starting to talk about some different things. But we're also starting to talk a little a little bit more like how commercial photographers might use this, or how video production might use this or movie sets or or anything along those lines. And that's that's where a lot of those gear that Godox is creating for LEDs is really some pretty cool, inexpensive, but high quality lighting gear for movie production, video production, all that kind of stuff. So there they are not necessarily thinking portraiture for some of this new gear. Could it be used that way? Sure. But I'm just want to point out right it right away because I don't want people to rush on go. Finally, you know, this is the thing I can use for portraiture in my studio, and then you know, you fry everybody's eyebrows off. So but it does make me think Is this something you could use outside? Because outside you've got a lot of ambient light people's irises are constricted because of their pupils are constricted because of that. And can they tolerate more light? Yeah, but it's still you know, if you do the classic in this overpower the sun. Let's not even go there because that just annoys the hell out of me. What you're trying to do is you're trying to balance with the sun, by the way, overpower the sun is trying to take new time sun and make it look like midnight. No, that's not what we're trying to do here. The only way you can overpower the sun is to get a bigger sun. So but can we balance with the sun we're going to put the sun behind the subject and we're going to bring out this big powerful LED and we're going to try to balance with it. Is this enough power to do that with the reflector in it? Yes. With a for now I'll hit Yeah, but it's not going to be any different than turning your subject towards the sun. And one of the reasons we turn them away from the Sun is because why it's too bright, it's going to make them squint. So I don't know if we solve that problem, but I'm willing to give it a try once we get these things in stock. So FYI, it's coming, it could be a cool thing and might have a great application for you, him probably has an application for a smaller subset of everybody listening here. But it might be the thing you've been dying for and waiting for. And I think it's just really cool. You know, the fact that Godox is really expanding their lines, and really trying to have a product for everybody. So that's coming out soon. When will I have it a MoLight? I don't know. And that's the answer for just about everything right. Now. One while I have this, I don't know. Because all depends on we got a lot of factors going on one production is ready when they ship. We've got Chinese New Year hitting here is early this year. And then we've got the whole shipping backlog. So when's this gonna show up? I don't know. But let's change direction just slightly. While we're on the topic of, of LEDs, I just received a large shipment from my other LED supplier. And that's Golden Eagle. And for those of you who don't know about Golden Eagle, my maid of honor speech again. They've been around for 33 years. And they are a leading supplier of flash and LED products in China. I discovered them a few years ago at the nav convention in Las Vegas, just prega, pre COVID. And I found their LED products to be an amazing value, very, very color accurate, very well constructed. At a very competitive price. They fit the niche or niche that I was trying to fill, I wanted something because at the time Godox really didn't have a very big LED array of products. And I wasn't really super happy with some of the color reproduction on some of their products back then. And since then they've gone Gonzo on LEDs, but at the time I needed an alternative. And I found Golden Eagle because I thought that they would fit from a quality standpoint. And then also from a cost standpoint, they would be able to fit into most people's budgets. So I secured a deal to make MoLight, the exclusive US distributor for Golden Eagle, which is cool. We're the exclusive so here's why I just got in touch I got a lot of cool things and but I just want to let you know some of the stuff here I got the LED 2000 which is been one of the best sellers ever since I brought in Golden Eagle but I've got the next evolution of it. It's the LED 2000 by color 200 watt LED it's a cob style LED, this new version allows you to dial in the color temperature from 2700 degrees up to 6500 degrees Kelvin. And every point in between, you can get 2720 820 903,000 Whatever. So if you're trying to work in ambient light and trying to color match that so you're in some tungsten lighting or whatever you can do that you can dial it in. So again, yeah allows you to color match temperature and have the ambient light or you can use the color temperature creatively. My friend Jen Lewis likes to use her Golden Eagle sad panel which is another bike color LED as she sets it to a warmer color temperature and uses that as hair light for headshots. It adds a nice warm glow, it's a little different look. And that's something that's kind of unique to her look the new LED by color, LED 2000 by color, I should say, as another surprise, you can now run it off of a V mount battery. In addition to using AC power, the old one was only AC. Now if you want to use this on location or even use it outside, you can drive it with a V mount battery. Isn't that awesome? So you can check out this and several other brand new Golden Eagle LEDs I might talk about in future future podcasts because there's some other really cool new stuff you can find us on the LED section of the MoLight store website. So where's that@www.go mo lytx.com Of course, thank you again for joining me for Monday morning cup of Mo please subscribe and follow I will also be posting more information on the podcast Facebook page. So if you're on Facebook, please look up that page and be sure to follow that as well. And then while you're at it, hey, what the heck might as well join the Monday morning cup of Mo podcast group where you can ask questions you can suggest topics and you can join the rest of the community as we grow this together. Talk to you next week.