In this video I’m talking about strip boxes—specifically why your stripbox looks patchy or uneven, and how to fix it. A lot of people sleep on strip boxes because they only think “hair light” or “rim light,” but I use them anywhere I’d use a modifier. I’m in Vegas and it’s windy, so a 1x5 strip is way easier to manage outdoors than a big octa that turns into a sail. The tradeoff is you’ve got to be strategic, and you’ve got to get even output across the whole modifier. The big issue is the light source. When you throw a Fresnel-head speedlight into a long strip, the hotspot sits in the middle because the light is concentrated at the center of the modifier. I meter it and show a huge difference top/center/bottom. Then I compare that to an AD400/“8400” style bare bulb setup, which spreads way more evenly through the strip. After that, I test a dome diffuser on the speedlight to make it act more like a bare bulb, and it improves the spread. The simple “fix” that really levels things up is a deflector plate (or even a DIY version like aluminum foil) to kill the center hotspot—especially with Fresnel speedlights or non-frosted bare bulbs. But if you’re using a frosted bare bulb (like the 8400 I used), you may not need the deflector at all because you can end up double-diffusing the center.