Tip : Delayed strobes

With studio photography we often forget that we can use strobes very creativity.
We press the shutter and the strobe fires…. right?
Well yeah in most cases that’s the way it works, unless your trigger doesn’t work of course, in which case you have to press again.

With the release of the Elinchrom ELC units there was a new feature called “delayed”, there are many new features but today it’s about this one. The Delayed setting makes it possible to trigger the strobes after an XXXXX amount of time, for example 3 seconds. This means you press the shutter and…. nothing happens, but after 3 seconds (or any other time) the strobe fires, you could call it second curtain sync, but trust me its MUCH more flexible, because you can also set for example 3 strobes up in different times, but I don’t want to go to extreme today.

The nice thing is that this feature is not necessary to do cool effects, you can of course also just put the camera on a tripod and open up the shutter and after 2-3 seconds press a skyport/other remote, it gives the “same” effect you just have to time it yourself.

In the following shots we used LedGo led panels (but you can also the modeling lights of another strobe) to give us continues light, and after 3 seconds the ELC was fired. Now these were shot during a workshop so I didn’t really have time to create something that was really cool (that takes a lot of tries) but you can see the effect, and I included 4 more images we shot a while ago with Nadine where I did have some more time.

The image on top is what I call a VERY lucky shot, this was done my moving around myself, the model and zooming, I just LOVED the crop as it came out of the camera so I made it black and white, added some contrast and voila….. well ok this image was actually sharp (inside joke, don’t worry if you don’t get it)