Well I finally took the plunge following the SWPP trade show and bought myself an Elinchrom D-lite 2 kit from GW Digital and Photo who seem to be offering the best price for these lights that I could find anywhere.
The kit comprises of 2 x 200w D-lite studio flash heads, 2 x softboxes (one 65x65cm and the other 53x53cm), 2 x lighting stands, 2x sync and power leads, a DVD lighting guide and all fitted into 2 soft shoulder bags.
The lights were smaller versions of those I used on my studio portraiture course but should give plenty of power for the situations I'm planning on using them in.
I got them set up in the living room last night and gave them a quick testing. They were very easy to set up and in under 10mins I was ready to start shooting. I triggered them via my existing SB600 flash set on minimum power as the units have a slave sensor on them.
Once the settings on the flashes had been tweaked after a few test shots, I was very happy with the results in the short time I tried them. The immediate benefit of the digital controls is that the power of the units can be varied in 1/1oths of an f-stop to enable immediate and accurate settings to be made. I'll be having another go over the next couple of days so I'm fully prepared for another portrait session I'm doing on Saturday morning. Watch out for some shots taken with these over the next few weeks.
24 January 2008
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2 comments:
Hi,
I'm looking at renting a D-Lite set for some work I have coming up and looking at the best way to trigger. You said that your SB-600 fired the lights, was is at simple as setting the D-Lite lights to slave and the SB-600 to commander when mounted on the hot shoe?
Hi,
I did initially use my SB600 to trigger the lights using the in-built slave cell on the D-lites. I set the SB600 to manual and then just set the power of it to as low as it would go (so as not to interfere with the other studio lighting). You can't use commander mode as that only relates to the Nikon CLS and makes no difference.
I now use a couple of other methods to trigger the lights - I've got an IR flash trigger which fits to the camera hotshoe (about £15) and fires an IR pulse to set of the D-lites. The main thing I now use is a set of radio triggers - you can get very cheap ones off of ebay for about £15. I slot the small transmitter onto the camera hotshoe and then with the receivers plugged into the synch port on the D-lite, everything fires easily. The range of them is great and I certainly don't see the need for Pocket Wizards or the Elinchrom Skyports just at the moment.
HTH.
John
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