Shooting on location is still one of the best things to do, however not everyone will have the budget to buy into 2 systems, one for the studio and one for on location. In our studio we use a mix of Elinchrom units in the studio and 2 Elinchrom Rangers and a Quadra for the location work, but I have to be honest it’s quite an investment of course, especially when you don’t shoot on location for your work (get paid) or if you just shoot on location a few times. In the past there have been some solutions to get your “studio” strobes working on location but I have to be honest that I never really was truly excited about them, well that has changed. Let me start with how this story evolved…..

 

I love to use smoke on location, to get the smoke working we always bring a Kipor gas generator which works very well, and it can even power your strobes (make sure you get a clear Sinus version because otherwise it will fry your strobes) but let’s be honest it’s noisy and especially in locations where there are houses close by and you shoot at night well let’s say that it’s better to have something silent, so I started researching a portable accupack to power my smoke machine. Very soon I ended up with the company Innovatronix, in the past I already used one of their battery powered packs and sold it when I switched to rangers, at that point it was an ok solution but it was not perfect (far from), the guys at Innovatronix were so kind to send me their XT-3 for a review to see if it worked on the smoke machines and to let me play with it, what follows is purely my opinion so don’t read it as an in depth look at the system, just my working experience with it.

 

 

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Small gifts for great photographers by Annewiek Doorhof

 

A few weeks ago I saw an add of PhotoJojo.com (Google knows my interests, mmm). This online webshop sells the most marvellous stupendous outrageous fantatabulous prodigious tremendous photography curiosities on earth. Really these are their own words. They have been mentioned in Scott Kelby’s online show The Grid a few times. So they must be reliable.

As it is always difficult to buy small presents for the coming holiday seasons, especially for a man who has “everything” he needs, I took a look in this shop. Many of you know Frank is into analogue photography nowadays, or better said this is his analogue revival (we bought a fridge especially for al the analogue stuff, and it’s already filled up), and this webshop offers indeed a lot of great gifts, ranging from cheap to expensive. But most of all (in this case) Photojojo sells a lot of analogue gadgets and has free shipping in the US. Because we planned on doing a workshops with our big “small flash” friends of ExpoImaging in Santa Cruz, I  already earned 12 USD for shipping, having the shipment sent to them (hey we are Dutch after all).

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