Party dancer
Double speedlite setup. Image taken by Diego García de Rio. Should be correctly accreditted if used. To achieve a professional result even in the middle of a dance party, this particular setup was created. The two speedlites bouncing off the umbrellas are portable all around the dancing hall. The two bounce surfaces create a big area of light that softly illuminates the subject.
I really appreciate the patience of Janna while I took more than 15 minutes to find the right position for the lights to achieve the right color coverage on the wall behind her. She did great by keeping her concentration and giving me a great pose to work with. It made the effort worthwhile!
(Lights: used a green and a blue gel on 2 speedlites placed on the ground. The model was lighted with a single speedlite in a Exybox 80 high above her)
As nobody seems to guess what I’d like for Christmas, this year I put a little box under the tree with my name on it. It contained the new Viewfinder Photography’s Speedlight Kit. This kit comprises a set of light modifiers for speedlites: A beauty dish with accessories (3 honey combs, 3 colored snap-on filters, 3 internal deflectors (white, silver and gold), a snoot and a dome diffusor. The design is clearly based on the classical studio gear they resemble, but reduced in size to fit a speedlite.
Soon Disney will bring out a new movie with this kit. It’s called “Honey, I shrunk the studio gear”.
Sorry for the bad joke. Now seriously, it this kit any good?
I certainty didn’t have a good start with it. I took the dome diffusor (or giant white egg) to a family meeting for a safe test ride. As I often do, I put the flash on a GorillaPod to move around easily. One of the Gorilla legs succumbed to the combined weight of the flash and dome, and it felt down on its side. Like Humpty Dumpty on the fence, the egg difussor broke, leaving a hole for harsh undiffused light to escape. It was a silly slow-motion fall, I must add.
Viewfinder egg dome difussor broken
Probably, the most interesting piece of this kit is the mini beauty dish and the its accessories.
What is a beauty dish? In the “big flash” world, a beauty dish is a wide and shallow metallic reflector with a central deflector. The central deflector prevents direct light from the flash bulb to hit the subject, so light from the flash bulb is casted from the reflector and directed forward to the subject.
I took this picture of a huge beauty dish (with a honeycomb attachment) at Photokina last year:
As the name hints, beauty dishes are often used for portraits and the look they produce is ‘in vogue’ and sought for in the fashion industry. Certainly a good reason to try to translate that concept to the speedlite realm.
The mini beauty dish, is well… mini.
I put the mini beauty dish to work in a ‘water concept’ shoot I did recently. You can see it in action in this setup image (light source far right):
The beauty dish and honeycomb were key to provide the directional and focused light that made the image work. A wider beam of light would have introduced too strong reflections in the water flow and created a distraction from Stephanie, my model for the day.
Here’s one of the resulting images, where the effect of the dish is clearly visible:
I think the dish did the work of focusing the light in the right place. As you would expect from its size, it does not produce the broad light of the bigger studio versions, so don’t expect the ‘beauty dish’ look from this modifier. It’s functional to limit the spread of the beam from a speedlite and I see myself using it to introduce an accent in an image.
One thing I noticed is that the flash kept on firing at nearly full power all the time, even when the other flashes in the setup, powering bigger modifiers like the Ezybox 80, had to sweat a lot less (and therefore were recycling faster). The batteries of the 580EX in the dish ran out quite quickly. I do have my concerns about the design of a convex deflector to block the direct light from the speedlite. The space looks too small to let the light bounce back and get out through the -rather narrow- space between the deflector and the dish. It looks more like it traps the light instead of diffusing it. This will require more testing.
My conclusion? The most interesting part of this kit is the mini beauty dish. In this case, size matters, so don’t expect the same quality of light as from the bigger studio versions, but it can be quite useful to produce some light accents and make a portrait or scene more dramatic. As with every piece of kit, it’s a tool in the box. But in this case, some experience is needed to determine its best use. “Beauty dish” is certainly a bit misleading.
PS:
The snoot looks neat and its metallic construction feels quite robust, but I still have to give it a good use before posting any comments on it.
I did today my first shoot with a new set of Pocket Wizards MiniTT1 + FlexTT5.
In a typical indoor shoot like the one today, the IR communication would mostly work in the basic setups until I start moving around, getting too close to the softbox(es) or trying more tricky angles. In the past I’d have to revert to previous "known to work" positions and resume from there.
E-TTL is great for me, as I like to change my lights to follow the poses of the model in front but in the past, I’ve seen many black frames from that technique, sometimes breaking the flow of the shoot and affecting my mood.
But as from today, all that has changed. The radio communication of the PW TT1/TT5 units got me in every corner and for the first time I didn’t have to worry about turning heads (580′s heads–that is) to follow my movements around. The only black frame today was from empty batteries! 
That was a great way to close the year.
A happy new year to all and great light in 2010.
-Gerard.
Hunting Easter Eggs. In this image, one speedlite with a Lumiquest softbox was used to light the egg and another flash in a Lastolite Ezybox was used to light the girl behind. The balanced output was automatic calculated by the E-TTL system, even when the lights where illuminating different planes, requiring different power levels to achieve a similar light effect.
Dark Blue
-Gerard.
Britt
For this beauty portrait of Britt, only a Ezybox 60 with a speedlite 580EXII was used, high on top of her head, pointing at her face. Click. Done.
I think I like simple.
This is a ‘see it to believe it’ kind of post. After the war of the pixels, the digital SLR Titans Canon and Nikon went on to the war of the ISO and the EOS 5D MKII is the Canon answer to the Nikon D3 field advance.
With an EOS 5D MKII in my hands, I had to test this high ISO feature in something else than the ubiquitous gray wall picture. I though of the night pavilion of our local zoo as the best place for such a field test. The pavilion is dedicated to the night crawlers from the nature and light levels are accordingly VERY low.
Slender Loris in the dark (at the zoo, ISO 12800)
