The panel comes with the necessary adapter to fit it into an accessory shoe on a video camera or a hot shoe on a DSLR and I expect that is how the vast majority of people will use it. You will probably have guessed that I'm no fan of on-camera direct flash and the light from this panel isn't that different in quality from something that you would expect from a Speedlight. It only took me about five minutes to get the thing off of my camera and start to experiment with having it on a stand or even hand holding it away to the side.

The first thing that I wanted to know was exactly how much light can this small LED device actually put out. The basic answer is that at a range of 2 metres I was getting 1/125th of a second at f2.8 on 200 ISO. That isn't much light for general photography but it made me think about shooting some shallow depth of field stuff with a standard lens - going back to the kind of pictures that I used to shoot in black and white, long before my own hair went grayscale!

I had my lovely old 50mm f1.8 Canon EF lens in the car and so I stuck it on an EOS5D MkII whilst holding the Litepanel in my left hand and got my subject Carl to look at the light. I opened the lens right up and shot at 1/500th of a second at f1.8 on 400 ISO. I really like the effect and the lack of flash makes the image feel as if it were taken a few years ago too. Of course the truth is that much the same feel can be achieved using a Canon, Nikon or other make camera flash with a small light modifier on it - something like the Apollo or maybe even something home made but the process is different when there is no flash. Subjects seem less aware that exactly when the shutter is going down and far less aware how many frames you are burning through - and that's a good thing when you have such a shallow depth of field and need to overshoot a little to make sure you have a few frames that are sharp exactly where they need to be around the eyes.

Since doing this shoot I have tried using the panel for other things but have struggled to do much with it other than repeat this shot. Used directly above the lens the panel doesn't offer much for stills and it really becomes useless over about 3 metres away from the subject. I couldn't see any use for it with either an umbrella or a softbox but it has a real charm used up close and personal. The panel comes with a couple of heavy duty gels cut to fit and they are very useful - especially the straw (roughly 81C) one, which warms up skin tones beautifully.

This gadget was never designed for stills and, whilst it is pretty useful for video, it has a pretty limited range of applications. Having said that, so do ring flashes, beauty dishes and many other specialist light modifiers. As a working photographer you have to weigh up the cost effectiveness of every piece of kit that you buy and I am trying to decide if I can justify £350.00 for something that I might use a couple of times a year. To be honest, the jury is still out - I like what it does, but do I want to do those kinds of pictures often enough?