I like these lights. They feel well made and rugged. Like me.
And I don’t need to get a mortgage or sell my soul. Hopefully they’ll last too. Like me. (not my hair)
I bought the Goddox AB600BM, which is 100% manual, and softbox, to use on families, weddings and shoots like the one I’m showing you in this post.
It’s an amazing system. All radio signal controlled from the camera. Even though the 600 is not the TTL version, I prefer dialing in my output and figuring out exposure from the camera. It’s a fast, easy and versatile system.
One thing I do wish it had was the ability to switch to optical slave when needed. Why? If the radio thingie quits, I could manually fire these using an old school on camera flash or similar. I acquired a second “back up” transmitter…just in case.
The 200 I purchased back in May. Sorta my foray into this flash system.
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Back in April during the Lighting Mastermind we talked about the Goddox system, specifically the 200. For members HERE
Last week I dug deeper into using the newly acquired 600BM and showed you many examples from real paying gigs using real paying clients….families, executive…mostly families. That replay is HERE
Here’s a summary of the executive shoot. The set up…
The results:
Before shooting I had my assistant, Brent, aka the grunt, check on the reflection while firing the main.
These were shot outside, sorta in open shade. High speed synch with a very wide aperture around 2.8. Using the 85mm 1.8 Batis lens created a smooth and much desired background. Shutter speed? Who knows. It was plenty fast to let me hand hold and I simply “dialed in” the best speed for ambient light exposure. All possible with the high speed synch feature.
I love this system, plain and simple.
A few more from this shoot and a few other family shoots that I dug into during the July Lighting Mastermind presentation.
More to come…stay tuned.
Robert N. Provencher – Your Master Coach Marketer
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Rob,
Several of the volume T&I shooters have started using the Godox lights lately. Mostly, I think, because of the high-speed sync feature so they can get more dramatic contrast with a darker ambient background light and accurate flash placement.
Back in the film days, I used to routinely do this with my medium format film cameras by just dialing up a shutter speed on the leaf shutter lenses to 1/500 and finding a matching aperture that would balance the flash and be about 1 stop under with the ambient. The beauty of these Godox lights with HSS is that you can dial in even faster shutter speeds so you can open up the lens to not only get the lower ambient light, but also better bokeh. I think I’d seriously consider these lights if I got busy with my T&I work again or was doing more outdoor portraiture. Don’t need the auto-exposure stuff as long as you’ve got HSS.
aaahhhh yes, the good old days. I remember doing that too….sorta. That was a loong time ago 🙂
Rob