The New Backscatter LED Snoot light – A Review

To get the most out of your underwater macro videography and photography, we would like to introduce you to some amazing Backscatter products. The MF-1 Backscatter Mini Flash and the Backscatter Macro Wide Light will help you capture even the tiniest creatures underwater in amazing shots!

Additional light is essential for the perfect illumination of a macro scene underwater. In underwater photography, you can achieve optimal results with external flashes. Here the image is seemingly frozen by extremely short exposure times. The contrasts are crisp and the colors are particularly vivid.

Mini Flash & Optical Snoot – The perfect combo for underwater macro photography

The MF-1 Mini Flash from Backscatter is an affordable, well-functioning, and compact yet powerful flash. It is an easy-to-use strobe that will improve your underwater macro photography considerably. Especially when you are using it with the OS-1 Optical Snoot.

Mini Flash & Snoot Kit (Mini Flash & the optical Snoot)

For underwater macro videography, on the other hand, we recommend a video light. Fortunately, Backscatter has taken care of that too….with a great product!

Backscatter Macro Wide 4300 & Optical Snoot – take your macro video skills to the next level

It is versatile, its size is great for travel and it offers many practical signaling options – the Backscatter Macro Wide 4300 is the ultimate video light. Especially for shooting macro! The 1400 lumen macro has been tailored for macro video shooters of all levels. The beauty of the Macro Wide Video Light is its versatility to easily go from lighting up a wide area for wide-angle down to a simple spot beam for macro.

To create an even tighter beam pattern for highlighting the smallest subjects pair the Macro Wide Video Light with the Backscatter OS-1 Optical Snoot. Snooting is the best way to help a macro subject that usually blends into its environment to stand out. Use a snoot when you wanna shoot with the most extreme exposure values. This way you get the most depth of field and will knock out the most ambient light for the darkest background – even in daylight.

The Macro Wide Video Light was designed from the ground up to be used with the Backscatter OS-1 Optical Snoot. The Optical Snoot snaps on to the front of the light. It will taper down and even more tightly focus that light beam into an even more precise point. Use either just the snoot itself or insert the aperture card to adjust that beam down to several even tighter points for the tiniest of tiny subjects.

Advantages of the Macro Wide Light

Snooting has been difficult to do for video. Since most lights either can’t accept the snoot or aren’t bright enough with the snoot. And if they are bright enough, they usually are too large to be practical for shooting macro. The Backscatter Macro Wide Video Light and the Optical Snoot combo can provide macro lighting that’s never been possible before in such a small easy to use package.

Backscatter MW-4300 & OS-1 Underwater Video Light & Snoot Package

The macro beam pattern pairs perfectly to the snoot to ensure the brightest beam possible from a snoot and video light combination. And has a fraction of the size of larger lights. The Macro Wide Video Light with Optical Snoot is capable of lighting a scene sharp with an exposure of 1/125, F22 with ISO 100. This is perfect for 4K 60p video recording.

In wide mode with a snoot the light will appear less bright than in macro mode. As the macro mode has been focused to optimally work with the optical snoot. To help avoid making the mistake of shooting in wide mode with the snoot there is an indicator LED light to conveniently show if the light is in macro mode. You’ll save battery power and increase brightness by using the macro mode for snooting.

So you see, there are great possibilities to capture tiny underwater creatures and other macro subjects with our Backscatter Kit packages.