There's a drawer in every working photographer's home. Inside it: gear you bought, gear you justified, gear you swore you'd grow into. A speedlight, almost certainly. Maybe two. They cost real money. They perform on spec sheets. And they spend most of their lives waiting.
The drawer isn't the problem.
The problem is the bag. Every time you pack it, you make a calculation. The flash is 380 grams. It has its own pouch. It needs its own batteries. It changes what your camera weighs on the strap. So when you're going out the door — to lunch, to a friend's apartment, to walk in your own neighborhood — the flash stays behind.
And the picture you make that day, if you make one, is made without it.
You chose your camera for a reason.
You didn't choose your camera by spec sheet alone. You chose it because it fit in a jacket pocket you actually wear. Because it didn't ask you to become a different person to use it. Because its weight on your shoulder, after a few weeks, started to feel like part of your shoulder.
You chose intimacy.
Your flash should have done the same. But the industry kept treating flash as a separate category — a thing you bolt on when the work gets serious. As if the work that matters is only the work you scheduled.
The work that matters is the work you make on a Tuesday, in your friend's living room, when she leans against the window and the light from the street is almost — but not quite — enough.
A different problem to solve.
For three years, we've been asking what would change if a flash were designed to live on your camera rather than wait for you in a drawer. The answer wasn't a smaller speedlight. It was a different kind of object — one that's quiet about most things, and precise about the few that matter.
We named it Pocket Flash.
What follows is what we ended up building, and what changed when we did.
The lift above the lens.
Most flash heads sit on the hot shoe. Ours pivots above it.
The folding arm — we call it the Z-Lift — moves the head about four centimeters higher than where your camera's hot shoe would otherwise put it. Four centimeters isn't a dramatic distance. But it's the distance that changes which problems your flash is solving.
A flash that sits at hot shoe height stops every long lens hood it meets. It flattens faces because the light has nowhere to fall from. It catches glasses head-on and turns them into mirrors. Four centimeters up, and those problems start to dissolve. The light clears the lens — even on a 70–200mm f/2.8. It falls from a slight angle, which gives a face contour. It misses the worst angle for catching a glasses reflection.
"The articulating arm changes how you think about positioning light on the go. It is just too convenient not to bring."
— Katarina Benzova, Professional Photographer
The mechanism is a hinge, but it's the most-considered part of the product. We iterated through fourteen versions before finding the one that holds its position with no slack, deploys with one finger, and folds flat enough to forget about.
Two lights in one body.
Inside one chassis, there are two light sources.
The first is a manual flash. Guide Number 12 at ISO 100. Seven stops of power, dialable from full to 1/64. At full power, the unit fires about 700 times on one charge with a 2.3-second recycle; at quarter, recycle drops to a second and the flash count climbs to roughly 3,000. At 1/64, you can take 35,000 frames before the charge dies.
The second is a continuous LED. 2W in standard mode, 4W in boost. Bi-color from 2700K to 6500K. CRI 96.
Most photographers don't realize they want a continuous light on their flash until they have one. It lets you see what the strobe is going to do before you press the shutter. You frame. You adjust. You watch the shadow land on the face you're about to photograph. And then you make the picture.
The flash creates the final image. The LED was there to help you see it.
"The bones are good. The feel is right. This is what a pocket flash should have been all along."
— Shawn Bruce, Leica & Lumix Creator
Built to be brought.
Pocket Flash weighs 125 grams. About the weight of a deck of cards.
A full-size speedlight starts at 380 grams.
That gap — between a small thing you bring and a heavier thing you don't — is where most of the photographs that almost happened live. The wedding photographer's third lens. The street shooter's second body. The traveling editorial's softbox. Everything we leave behind is gear that was probably going to be useful.
A flash you'll actually carry is, by definition, the only flash that helps.
The continuous LED runs about 7 hours at 25%, 4 hours at half, 2 hours at full. Charging is over USB-C. Operating temperature runs from -10°C to 40°C. Controls are physical: a dial, dedicated buttons, a small screen. There's no app to install, no firmware lookup, no menu structure to memorize. You set the power. You shoot.
What working photographers told us.
We've put early Pocket Flash units in the hands of photographers who don't take pictures of their gear — only with it. A few of the things they said:
"It is already a new favorite in the kit. The magnetic modifiers snap on instantly."
— Mynxii White, Leica SL & Q3 Photographer
"The more I use this, the more I think there is something here. The build quality is unlike any pocket light I have handled."
— Simon, Hasselblad Street Photographer
These weren't sponsored statements. They were observations made during ordinary work — weddings, editorial assignments, walking around looking for things to photograph. The pattern we kept hearing was the same: the product gets into the workflow quietly. It doesn't ask to be noticed.
Two ways to start.
Pocket Flash ships in two configurations.
The Standard Kit is the flash core: the light unit, a magnetic diffuser, four color gels, a Type-C charging cable, and a small pouch. Enough to start shaping light the day it arrives.
The Creator Kit adds the Material Blade system — a magnetic adapter and four textured blades you snap onto the front of the flash. The blades project patterns: window blinds, dappled bokeh, neon caustics, soft edges. You don't replace your scene; you add atmosphere to it. The Creator Kit also includes a premium vegan leather carrying case, sized to slide into the side pocket of a camera bag.
If you mostly want light, start with Standard. If you want to shape light into atmosphere, start with Creator.
There isn't a wrong answer. Both kits use the same flash.
Brown leather, or Midnight black.
Pocket Flash comes in two colorways.
The default is brown vegan leather — tones chosen to live alongside vintage-styled cameras like the Fuji X100, the Ricoh GR, the Leica Q-series. The leather is eco-friendly, made without animal materials, and finished to look quietly considered rather than aggressively modern.
The Midnight Edition is black-on-black — for photographers whose work tends to live at the edge of available light, or who prefer a tool that doesn't visually announce itself.
The hardware is identical. The choice is aesthetic.
Light built to be trusted.
We don't make light to be replaced. We make light to be trusted. The best tools don't expire — they grow with you, from your first portrait to your thousandth, from a hotel hallway to a studio floor.
We didn't build a smaller speedlight.
We built a flash for the way you already live.
