What’s The Buzz?

As you know, we’ve been busy here, upgrading equipment for our photographic business, Orchard Studios. With a new camera, from Canon instead of Nikon, came the need to make a decision about new flash equipment. To this point, we’ve been using Nikon’s wireless “creative lighting system,” based around an SB-800 and a pair of SB-600 speedlights. It’s been just about adequate, but, is often pushed to its limit. And, of course, it won’t work with the Canon.

For the past few days, I’ve been researching alternatives. What I finally came up with is a hybrid system — partially “dedicated” on-camera flash, and a pair of Alien Bees B400 monolights.

The B400’s would be, if all things were equal, about twice as powerful as a Nikon SB-800 or a Canon 580EX, have a continously variable power setting and a modeling light that tracks the power level. They also have some really nifty options available for wireless remote control of up to 16 flash heads. Very cool.

For the on-camera flash, I’ve chosen a Sigma EF 500 DG Super, which will mimic all of the Canon specific functions, and can also act as a fully manual slave unit, if needed — something the Canon flashes cannot do. That allows it to do triple duty — on camera (or on bracket) flash for general shooting, wedding receptions and the like; third low-power slave light, for hair lighting, etc.; or, it can be used on camera to trigger the Alien Bees using their internal optical slave. Nice!

I’ve also figured out how to get the Canon built-in pop-up flash to not send any “pre-flash,” so it can be used to trigger all the remote flashes without the need for a sync cable, if necessary.