Its been a little quiet around here (I keep telling myself to blame the economy) so I thought I would finally finish adding a selection of fine art prints to my website. All orders are printed on archival museum etching using the Canon Chroma Life 100 dye printing system, which is a dye based printing process for outstanding color saturation and print stability of 75+ years. All prints are shipped raw (unframed). As a special thank you for visiting my blog, use the coupon code “blog” to take 15% off of your order total.
After my disaster with my Inovatronix ExplorerXT I decided to go with the AlienBees Vagabond II. All I can say is that it performed FLAWLESSLY! I have nothing bad to say about it. The recycle times were impressive (less than 1 second with 3 AlienBees B800 units at about 1/8 power). It’s nice to be back in action in the mobile power department.
Rena did great and she is a long-time friend. We sneaked into and shot in the old sub-level of Old Sacramento. It was a fun shoot and I really enjoyed working with her!
Congratulations to Mr. & Mrs. Ellenberger. They were married in Berkeley, CA on June 26th 2009. The ceremony was held in an amazing redwood forest in the Berkeley botanical gardens.
People here in the valley were treated to an awesome electrical storm that spanned from the Sierra Nevadas to the Bay Area and lasted several hours. Of course, I was out in the middle of it getting some shots. This is something we won’t see again for quite some time and just wanted to share.
Here are some sample shots I made with a pair of AlienBees monolights. Overall, I feel like they performed very well. In fact, I had no problem what-so-ever. I can not say enough good things about my Innovatronix Explorer XT portable power unit. The lights functioned just as if they were plugged into a regular wall outlet with identical recycle times and performance. Obviously, you can’t use the modeling lights with a portable power pack, but I liberally used them for a couple seconds at a time and saw no impact on the charge of the unit.
The setup on these shots is fairly straight forward. The key light is a PW’d AlienBees B1600 at about 1/4 power with a 47″ octobox setup on a C-Stand with grip arm. The octobox is about 3 feet above and to the side of the subject pointing down at her.
The second light is another PW’d AlienBees B800 with a 10 degree honeycomb grid firing at about 3/4 power toward the subjects feet to light up the ground a little. On some shots, I moved the B800 directly behind the subject to act as a hair/rim light. Same settings.
All images taken on a Nikon D3, with a Nikkor 28-70mm f2.8 @ ISO 200 and roughly 1 – 1/2 second @ f6.
After some serious consideration, I finally decided to invest in an AlienBees lighting setup. I had read a lot of great reviews about their stuff, but I also had read some s0-so or even negative reviews about them as well. After spending a day with the system, I really feel like I got my money’s worth. I plan to write a full review soon. Here is a super quick one though…
AlienBees B800 and B1600 flash units – Great! Satisfactory to very satisfactory build quality. Lexan body seems sturdy and not “plasticy”. The accessory mount, while different, seems like it will hold up well against the smorgasbord of light modifiers I picked up. Even a 5 foot octabox. Great features like modeling light tracking, senstitive optical slave, ability to use the modeling light as a ready light, telling you when your flash is recycled. I like that the swivel tightening lever can be adjusted by simply pulling it out and reorienting it to where you want. This will help guard against strain and fatigue on the moving parts.
The Paul C Buff Octabox and Extra Large foldable softbox assemble in seconds. (not counting putting the front on). Literally the easiest softboxes to put together. The AlienBees proprietary accessory / speedring mount is equally easy to manage. More on these soon I hope.
Now, to the point of my post. There was one troubling scenario I had ran across a couple times on the photo sites about the inconsistent light output of AlienBees units, especially at low power settings. This was a big area of concern for me so I decided to see for myself if there was any truth behind these stories. I used a Sekonic L358 meter and put them to the test. See the results for yourself. There is some slight variance in output, mainly right after lowering the output of the flash. I assume this happens as the capacitors fully discharge.
The B800 performed well in my opinion, and the B1600 performed even better. No, these are not Profoto or Dynalite quality flashes BUT for under $400 a piece, you really can’t go wrong with these lights. I hope this helps anyone who’s on the fence.
I just noticed that I had an update ready for installation today. It was an update for Adobe Acrobat 8.1.4. All I can say is FINALLY! For as long as I have been using Acrobat on Windows XP 64 and Vista 64, I have been unable to use the PDF Printer in any application. It would simply crash and give no love. I had to resort to Bullzip PDF Printer, which by the way is a fantastic free PDF printer. I am happy to inform you that 8.1.4 appears to have fixed the 64-bit printing bug completely. At least on the one workstation I installed it on. The release notes make no mention what-so-ever about this fix, only stating that it is patching security vulnerabilities, but all I know is that I can now combine and print PDFs from any application (MS Word for example) with no problems at all.
I would love to hear if others are having similar success!
Windows users can get it here: (You can only upgrade to 8.1.4 if you are currently running 8.1.3)
Microsoft’s much anticipated and so far applauded update to it’s miserable OS Windows Vista will be available to everyone, tomorrow, as a free download. I have heard that this beta is the most solid ever released by Microsoft. I think I might give it a whirl, just to try it out!
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