Strobes for 4x5 portraiture

TheFlyingCamera · Mar 19, 2010

Charles- unless you're shooting 5x7 or bigger, the hot-shoe flashes should be quite adequate. One workaround for the AC-strobe issue is with many modern power packs, they have a low-power recycle option that makes the pack take longer to recharge, but it only draws a fraction of its usual amperage. Also, if you are working in an apartment, most likely you don't have giant spaces that require gobs and gobs of power to light, so you could dial down the power settings and work with low power on the slow recycle and never trip the breaker.

36cm2 · Mar 19, 2010

shimoda said:
Start with Light, science and magic Excellent book.

r

Damn, that does look good. It's in the shopping cart, along with Hollywood Portraits by Roger Hicks, which looks interesting for the old school look.

Mats_A · Mar 19, 2010

36cm2 said:
Damn, that does look good. It's in the shopping cart, along with Hollywood Portraits by Roger Hicks, which looks interesting for the old school look.

It IS a very good book. It is not a book about portrait lightning per se but it will teach you a LOT about lightning. After you read it you will know what family of angles mean
Really liked my copy. Learned a lot from it.

r

markbarendt · Mar 20, 2010

Chazzy said:
I'm very interested in this discussion, but something no one has mentioned is the problem of electricity. I live in an older apartment with only two circuits (I have to unplug the refrigerator when I run the microwave), and one of the realities of doing portraits in my living room is that it would be very easy to blow a fuse with multiple lights. I even worry about having several AC-powered strobes recycling at the same time. The best I have been able to figure out is that my apartment wiring should be able to accommodate charging one of those portable battery packs, if I run strobes off of that. In the meantime I am doing the best I can with battery-powered hot-shoe flashes (I have several of them) and umbrellas and dreaming of renting some time in a well-equipped studio.

I have one of the battery packs and it works great, actually makes my four studio strobes portable. The one I have charges off a car's cigarette lighter receptacle in addition to AC power.

I also have a small stable of speedlights and they are truly handy too.

A book that you may want to look at is "the Hot Shoe Diaries".

Chazzy · Mar 20, 2010

Does anyone make a sturdy bar for converting one hot shoe into two? I've seen something offered for the Cosina "Voigtländer" cameras, but it doesn't look sturdy enough to support two hot-shoe flashes.

removed account4 · Mar 20, 2010

the speedtron pack and 2 lights would work well
2400 ws is a ton of light. soft boxes will dim the light a little bit, but still ...
if you have your heart set on the speedtrons,
get a third light head and tons of honeycomb grids so you can bleed off more light

i have worked with speedtrons in the past, nice lights, but i am partial to monoblock lights.
they are self contained units ... you need less light on 1 head, you just dial it down and the other light/s
stay the same.

have fun reading through the opinion pages!

john

36cm2 · Mar 20, 2010

Posted wirelessly..

Yeah, I'm between the monolights and fresnels at this point. We'll see how it changes after some educational reading.

Lee L · Mar 20, 2010

Chazzy said:
Does anyone make a sturdy bar for converting one hot shoe into two? I've seen something offered for the Cosina "Voigtländer" cameras, but it doesn't look sturdy enough to support two hot-shoe flashes.

The C/V units supplied two cold shoes, no electronic connectivity for firing a hot shoe flash. They were made to support two smaller items, e.g. a finder and bubble level finder, a finder and C/V shoe mount meter, and would do OK with a small flash (e.g. Vivitar 125) with a thin vertical front face with PC cord. They won't work for flash units much wider than the shoe because of spacing. They are sturdy enough to hold two hot shoe flashes, but that's not the point.

Putting leverage on a standard camera hot shoe with a large bar and multiple flashes of any size or weight isn't something I'd do. After market flash brackets are made to cover that, and attach to the camera at the tripod socket.

Many of the monolights limit their current draw, or draw heavy current for times so short (small fractions of a second) that they won't trigger most 15 amp breakers or fuses even with a couple on the same circuit.

Lee

Chazzy · Mar 20, 2010

Lee L said:
The C/V units supplied two cold shoes, no electronic connectivity for firing a hot shoe flash. They were made to support two smaller items, e.g. a finder and bubble level finder, a finder and C/V shoe mount meter, and would do OK with a small flash (e.g. Vivitar 125) with a thin vertical front face with PC cord. They won't work for flash units much wider than the shoe because of spacing. They are sturdy enough to hold two hot shoe flashes, but that's not the point.

Putting leverage on a standard camera hot shoe with a large bar and multiple flashes of any size or weight isn't something I'd do. After market flash brackets are made to cover that, and attach to the camera at the tripod socket.

Many of the monolights limit their current draw, or draw heavy current for times so short (small fractions of a second) that they won't trigger most 15 amp breakers or fuses even with a couple on the same circuit.

Lee

Actually, I wasn't planning on using two flashes in a hot shoe on a camera. I should have specified that I was talking about cold shoesmy mistake. I have some umbrella brackets which are made to tilt and which have a cold shoe fitting on the top. I think I also have the option of taking off the cold shoe and mounting to a brass 1/4x20 fitting. Is there a bar of metal with two cold shoes on it that would mount to one of my umbrella brackets, in case I want the power of two shoe-mount flashes? It sounds like the kind of thing that Manfrotto might make.

Lee L · Mar 20, 2010

Chazzy said:
Is there a bar of metal with two cold shoes on it that would mount to one of my umbrella brackets, in case I want the power of two shoe-mount flashes? It sounds like the kind of thing that Manfrotto might make.

Midwest Photo Exchange has a department for people using equipment in this way, named after the online 'strobist' page that you probably know about, and cooperating in providing solutions and products suggested on the strobist page. My first two clicks on the Midwest Photo strobist page got this: Dead Link Removed
They have lots of other useful stuff in that department for people trying to get the most out of shoe mount flash units.

Lee

Strobes for 4x5 portraiture

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