Balancing effectiveness with portability?

[Pete Wells]

Hi all,

I'm on the hunt for my first strobe(s).

My camera is a Sony RX100 with a Fantasea housing.

All my camera gear needs to be packed in my cabin bag when travelling, so size and weight are key considerations in making a choice.

I'm not going to sell photos and don't want to 'go pro' but I am interested in photography in and of itself and want to create striking images.

I am aware that a modelling light will also be useful to position it to counter backscatter.

Can anyone out there recommend a good strobe that's portable but also useful for fish portraits, macro work, and the occasional close-up encounter with turtles, seals, sharks and rays?

All help, tips and advice appreciated.

Thanks,

Pete

 

[bvanant]

We travel with old ThinkTank bags. In my cabin bag I have housing/camera/lenses (OM-D EM-1 II/Nauticam) ports and 2 strobes. If you are only shooting macro look at the Backscatter small strobes, good for macro and portraits, not so powerful for WA (where mostly you will use God's Light) For focus light, we use Sola 2000s.

Bill

 

[Chris Ross]

If you are using an RX-100 the small sensor means you only really need to stop down to f5.6, which means demands on your flash are relatively mild. The INON S-2000 is hard to go past - compact with a 100 deg beam. If you are f5.6 you can do proper wide angle work with this strobe and macro as well of course.

It doesn't have a built in light and this is no great loss- I have INON Z-240s and never use the light, they only have a 20 deg beam and so are fairly useless for aiming as they have nowhere near the coverage of your strobe. The only use for these lights is for snooting and the vast majority of strobes don't have the flash beam and light beam concentric so again don't show where the strobe is pointing with enough accuracy to be useful.

 

[Pete Wells]

Thanks Chris!

Checking the vast online shopping mall now...

Pete

 

[Pete Wells]

Also... would you argue that there's a real need for two such strobes straight away with this camera?

 

[bvanant]

I think two strobes are a lot better than one, but you can always start with one and then go to a second when you think you need. Like Chris, I think the S2000 is a great strobe but since I got the Backscatter minis I almost never take the S2000, but then again I am only shooting macro stuff. This was shot using two of the minis