Photography Thailand Forum

[bjorn slis]

Hi Guys,

for a while now I have been working a lot with strobist gear, nikon sb's and that worked fine especially after throwing out the cheap yongnuo triggers and buying better ones :-)
I mainly used them for product/food photography and some portraits.
Since I have some unused space I want to get some studio flashes to set up a permanent studio space for this kind of work, have been thinking about elinchrom 400 w/s flashes or alien bees or.... etc etc (there are so many different brands around.)
Want to start with 2 400ws ones and maybe an extra 200 ws.
Anyone got reccomendations ?

[Marc Schultz]

My only comment is that 400/WS is very little power. You will need to have the lights very close to whatever you are shooting pretty much at all times to get enough light output onto your subject and you probably wont be able to shoot at smaller apertures than F/8. With food and especially product photography you often need to be very close and zoomed in to the subject because of the small size of the objects you are shooting which means the DOF drops quickly from the telephoto affect. As a result, you often want to shoot at F/11, or maybe even F/16 if you are using a good quality macro lens in order to maximize sharpness of detail. You may find that 400/WS then is not enough power. I have one 400/WS strobe in my collection and it is always the last one to come out of the case. For portraits at F/8 and down to F/4 then of course 400/WS should be no problem. I hope that helps.  

[bjorn slis]

very usefull info Mark, thanks, any reccomendations for what flashes to buy ? (how much power ?)

[Marc Schultz]

Both the brands you mentioned are very good and well priced. 600/WS should be minimum. You can buy Bron Color if you have an unlimited budget.

By the way, to shoot food properly you need to use mostly back lighting and only a very very light fill from the front to cover some of the shadows.So about 3 lights. Usually you would put grids/honey combs on the back lights to bring out nice hard detail and texture on the food. Grids will suck up 2 stops of light on average. That means 2 stops of light will be lost from the use of grids normally. So 400/WS quickly becomes almost useless for food. Also these small 400/WS Elinchrom heads I don't think are designed to use with many of their standard light shaping attachments like grids, so that might be a problem. I hope that helps.    

[bjorn slis]

"You can buy Bron Color if you have an unlimited budget."  looked at the prices, a little over my budget.

thanks for the info

[Marc Schultz]

Don't worry, they are over most people's budgets.

[bkkdave]

This post finally prompted me to place an ad in the 'Equipment for Sale' section. I have always wanted to get into studio work and bought this equipment for that purpose; however I never tried to learn how to use it and never pursued it.