My friend and fellow photographer Emily brought the best toys over the other day – the Norman ML 600 monolight strobe.
Emily purchased a whole pile of used lighting equipment for a crazy good price, and brought some over saying, “This way you can figure out how they work and teach me.”
I’ve always wanted to work with strobes, because it’s just the most logical way to handle photographing people and eliminating the need for inane amounts of light to get decent shutter speeds. I’ve never actually used strobes for two main reasons:
- I also do independant film stuff and it just made sense to get lights that would work for video and photography.
- When researching strobes I read a lot of horror stories about the web of cables and power packs required to trigger the flashes together.
The monolight however, was a joy to work with. It has a built-in optical slave – so I just used my camera flash (set to lowest output, with diffusion filter, pointed straight up) and when the camera flash went off, so too did the monlight.
Emily is supposed to come over with more strobes soon and we’re going to play with them more thoroughly. I’m anticipating a delightful experience of actually using the camera hand-held in the studio! Delight!
