My New Studio Lights

Yesterday I posted about setting up my new studio equipment and taking a few photos using a single off-camera flash set up.  It worked – but it was very challenging and time consuming.

Just a couple of days after this shoot, my order from Paul Buff arrived in many, many boxes:

I spend most of an evening after work just unpacking everything and trying to figure out what goes where.  But of course I was itching to see what i could do with the lights so I set up a simple two light shoot using to of my Einstein E640 strobes shooting them through two 51-inch Parabolic Umbrellas, also produced by Paul Buff:

The piece of the puzzle I did not yet have was my Paul Buff Cyber Commander remote trigger set for remotely firing the strobes.  However, the Einstein’s do have the capability to be fired without the Cyber Commander using their on-board photo sensors (if any of them detect a flash, they instantaneously fire) and hooking up my camera to one of the strobes via the included synch cable.  So the idea is that the wired camera fires one strobe, while the flash it creates instantaneously fires the other strobe.  I grabbed a couple of our dogs and here’s the results:

I had no idea what kind of results I would get, but I was shocked at how easy it was to capture these photos.  I did virtually nothing configuration/setting wise to the strobes (mainly because I don’t yet know how…) – all I did was turn on the modeling light.  The difference in the amount of post processing needed on the photos is night and day as compared to the photos I took using the single off-camera flash.  The photos were almost perfectly exposed – including lighting up the white background, which I hadn’t expected.  Besides a little sharpening, minor color correction, and adding a border and some text, precious little else was needed – the photos were almost perfect right out of the camera.  That meant I could pick and choose between lots of great poses for the photos I wanted to use vs. trying to pick out the one or two photos that would require the least amount of post photo processing to “salvage.”

My Cyber Commander remote trigger kit should be her today or tomorrow so I’m hoping to have more and better shots to share soon.