This is a blog post I did for another blog a while ago but figured I might as well post it here now too.
I’ve been accumulating Alien Bee’s for years now and when they announced a year ago (now almost two years ago) they were going to make a new light, at the time called the MAX, I immediately put my name down for three of them based on the experience I’ve had with the Alien Bee system and the specs of the proposed MAX I was sure it would be a winner. Months later and the crew at Paul C Buff had issues with some of the technical parts of the light and some aspects of it mutated to make the light they now sell as the Einstein, which I’ve been lucky enough to have received my order.
So, I’m not going to give you a review on it because well I’m not qualified and there are many who have already, I will say it’s a brilliant light and I love using it as you will when you get yours. One of the things that interest me most about the Einstein is its flash duration, namely T1 numbers. I’ve been itching to do some extreme tests on it before taking it to jobs that are going to demand fast stopping flashes for a paying client so I got a model I worked with recently, Melissa Tan, to come into my COLD Canberra studio last week for a very demanding job so I could try a shot I’ve always wanted to do and at the same time really test the Einstein at what it does best. Needless to day she did a great job on what was a demanding shoot made harder by the time of year and lack of adequate heating in my studio.
GEAR
Canon 1D Mark II N
70-200 f2.8
3 x Einstein 640 flash units (version 1)
1 x Paul C Buff silver beauty dish w/ diffusion sock
2 x Potoflex softboxes w/grids
Cyber Commander and CSXCV transceiver modules
For these shots we just went with a simple three light set up seen in the diagram below. (made with Strobox on an iphone)
The main light was an Einstein shot through a Paul C Buff silver beauty dish with the diffusion sock attached. The beauty dish was slightly to camera right and about 8 feet off the ground.
The two rim lights were both Einstein’s and were shot through softboxes positioned about 45 degrees to the side and behind the model. They were on stands about head height to the model and were gridded to stop the spill hitting the camera lens.
I don’t recall my power settings as I’m still getting my head around the new Cyber Commander system (it takes a bit of getting use to) and so was a bit pre occupied with that. I did also work my power output based on t1 speeds instead of working aperture. I placed all three lights on a power setting that gave me 1/10,000th of a second flash duration (which I think was about 4 stops under full power.) And no that’s not a typo, that’s 1/10,000th of a second, faster than the fastest shutter speed on any of my cameras. I needed to keep them all at the same duration otherwise I might get ghosting in the faster moving bits of water so this is how I set it up and to fine tune my lighting ratio’s I just moved my softboxes closer or further away from the model. Typically this is a less than ideal way to work as your effecting the quality of your light along with the amount but as the two lights to be moved were both softboxes, were working as rim lights and were relatively close it wasn’t a concern. I could have further increased their size by putting them behind a panel had I needed to back them off a lot but as it was they stayed a workable distance from the subject so there was no need.
With the lights all on this setting I was also able to take advantage of the 8 frames per second and the flashes kept up without a problem. In fact I have tested these lights on a similar setting with martial artists and have shot a sequence on the Canon 1D mark IIII at 10fps for a sequence of 18 frames and the lights didn’t miss a beat and there is no exposure difference. Just think of the possibilities for sports images!!
We trialled a few different liquids, all having been heated in the microwave to ease the pain. We did some shots with straight water, flour and water mix and flour and water with food dye. All produced a nice effect but the clean up was a nightmare!. Glad I finally got to try the effect though, still think I could make it better with a few lessons I learnt on the shoot but I think I’ll wait til summer to try it again. Now I’ve got my Einstein’s the high-speed photography world just got a lot smaller.
