One of the most important factor in photography and videography is Lighting. it determines not only the brightness and darkness but it also creates the look and feel of the environment. So if you want to play with your pictures and video, you need to control and manipulate your light correctly to get the perfect shot. And with people moving to mobile and smartphone photography, the Lume Cube is the perfect companion for creating and manipulating lighting.
Body and Design
The Lume Cube is compact, yet powerful LED light source that is useful for mobile and outdoor photography (and even videos). It packs 1,500 lumens in a 1.5″ cube design, therefore you can also bring multiple cubes so you can play around with the light. The best feature is that you can remotely control multiple Lume Cubes with your phone via bluetooth — 5 to be exact, so these can act as external flash for photos and a fixed light for videos. The cube also has a screw found at the bottom so you can attach it to a tripod.
Specifications
As stated earlier, one Lume Cube can bright out 1500 Lumens, a believe me, it’s more than enough that it’s so blinding to the eye. The color temperature is somewhat cool at 6000K. It also has an internal battery that you can charge with just using your regular USB cable. Plus if you’re one of those photographers who love to take underwater photos, it’s also waterproof to about 100′.
Lume Cube Application
If you have decided to pair your smartphone to your Lume Cube, you can just download the app in either via Play Store or App Store in iOS as they are both available. Right now, the basic and pro is free for download so I suggest you download it now.
Both applications are easy to use. For the free version, you will only have the ability control one Lume Cube but it has all the essential options that you need: brightness control from 1-100 percent, red eye prevention, auto sync with smartphone shutter, and a battery level gauge. The pro version has more settings like: brightness, duration, red eye prevention, OptoTrigger, battery level, signal strength and of course the option to control five Lume Cubes simultaneously.
Sample Shots
Here’s a shot under a tree with the sun directly shining. The Lume Cube made it so that it would not make a silhouette effect.
A product shot with only the Lume Cube as lighting.
Again, a top-shot using the Lume Cube.
Conclusion
Lume Cube is the compact flash that’s perfect for the ones deep into smartphone photography. The body, design and construction is simple and perfect. And while the app is not optimized for high-resolution screens, it simply gets the job done effortlessly. The one thing that I would like to change is the color temperature, I just which it can be adjusted to different levels. Other than that, I highly recommend the little flash.
