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Largest softbox with speedlite
- Thread starter jamesev
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That's going to depend on the output of the speedlight.
What have you got?
What have you got?
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- Phil
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The main issue with a speedlight in a softbox is the fact it’s a fixed reflector / angle of light produced.
@HoppyUK recommends a fancy trick with a stofen to try to recreate a bare bulb type pattern.
But for clarity, if doubling up the size of the softbox, it’s not a logical conclusion to halve the power, surely the reason for doing it is to increase coverage, decreasing power would be unnecessary.
@HoppyUK recommends a fancy trick with a stofen to try to recreate a bare bulb type pattern.
But for clarity, if doubling up the size of the softbox, it’s not a logical conclusion to halve the power, surely the reason for doing it is to increase coverage, decreasing power would be unnecessary.
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Presumably you can mitigate that to some extent by setting the zoom to wide angle, Phil? My Metz goes down to 24mm and my assumption has always been that it gives a wider spread of light at that setting.
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It will, but it won't come close to a bare bulb which will fill the softbox with light....
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- Garry Edwards
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No it isn't, because the power is almost irrelevant. What is relevant is the ability of the flash to create even lighting across the entire area of the outer diffuser.
Everyone and his dog seems to have a different view on this, but I would say 60cm across is more or less OK for most applications, although more challenging subjects (such as product photography) would be a challenge, but probably not relevant because product photographers tend to use studio flash.
Putting the flashgun on the widest zoom setting and diffusing the output with a Stofen or similar is a big help, but it also depends on the design of the softbox, some are much better than others. This article may help a bit. https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/tutorials/which-type-of-flash.153/
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Makes sense....
Won't the output have an effect though?
A lower powered speedlight on the widest setting will have even less output?
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True, but if you're shooting indoors and you haven't got sunlight streaming through the windows you can increase the camera ISO to increase the effective power. Power is the least of the challenges, it shouldn't be ignored but it isn't a problem either, unless you have little or no control over the shooting environment, e.g. if you can't stop sunlight streaming through the windows, or if you're trying to shoot outdoors in bright light.Makes sense....
Won't the output have an effect though?
A lower powered speedlight on the widest setting will have even less output?
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It's not just about the size/diameter, but also the depth, the diffusion panels, and forward or reverse firing.
I would say the best option is a reverse-firing softbox or umbrellabox (usually cheapest and easiest, too). The design does an inherently good job of spreading the light around evenly after it bounces off the back.
Also regular forward-firing double-diffuser softboxes do a pretty good job of spreading the light from a speedlight, particularly those of a deeper design. For the same reason, speedlights don't fill larger softboxes so well because they're relatively shallow. Fitting a Stofen or other diffusion cap helps a bit but they also absorb light. Using the wide-panel has much the same effect - marginally better coverage but a loss of light. Just use the flash at its widest setting for maximum brightness.
The other thing I would say is, do you actually want perfectly even coverage with a softbox? For product photography I'd say yes, and anything else where perfectly smooth specular reflections are needed. I also prefer rectangular softboxes for that kind of thing. But for portraits? Bearing in mind that some photographers go to considerable efforts to avoid even coverage with beauty dishes and parabolic reflectors etc, it's certainly not a must-have.
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Just picture in your mind the beam from a speedlight at 24mm compared to a bare bulb which has a 180deg spread over 180deg..
Put a stofen on it and it looks a bit more like a bare bulb, but most of the light will still go straight forwardish
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Yes, a Stofen would be helpful, of course. I wasn't for a moment suggesting that it would be as effective ads a bare bulb, just that there are settings on the flash unit that can be used to advantage.
Phil I think the quoted spread of 24mm is about 74 degrees on many speedlites
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This is a very good point. I think that a lot of us (and certainly myself) preach a counsel of perfection, i.e. we tend to give answers that are technically right and ignore the fact that what is right for some isn't necessarily right for all, and even when it is 'right' it may not be important.
Sometimes it may not be important because the person who is asking the question may have lower standards but often it may not be important because the difference between right and wrong may not be obvious or may not even show up at all to the average viewer. As an example of this, if we create a high-end fashion shot in a large, dark studio then an unevenly-lit softbox will usually produce a poor result, but do the same shot outdoors where there's a fair bit of ambient light and we can't usually see the difference.
And yes, we often go to some lengths to deliberately avoid even light coverage, and not just for portraits. I'm probably one of the few on here old enough to have worked in photography before beauty dishes, reflective umbrellas and even softboxes were invented. Back then, we created our various lighting effects via DIY, often using a silk to create diffusion, and I often still use that technique, specifically to create uneven lighting effects. Some of you may have seen my use of crumpled or creased silks, or ones that have only had the very centre lit, or that have vertical or horizontal stripes, or that I've sprayed with aerosol paint, and then there are the oddities such as graduated diffusion (a great favourite for oddly shaped and difficult to light subjects such as the front element of a lens) And, even though we now have all the gadgets I still use these techniques, simply because they do a much better job for some subjects.
So, in summary, perhaps the best answer to this question is "If you only use a flashgun in a really small softbox then it will be more or less OK, but you can use it in any size or shape you like, as long as you're happy with the inevitable unevenness of the illumination, which sometimes can be a good thing and sometimes can be a bad thing."
sk66
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I agree with this... and you can go larger with this style (but size eats power). IME, the best ones for speedlights puts the flash inside but that can limit the ability to angle it if it's not on a boom/arm... and it can be a PITA if you don't have remote power control. And they are still usually fairly uneven because the speedlight sits well off-center; but it's more of a gradient type effect compared to the front firing hotspot.
This is also completely valid; but most of the times I've wanted to create a gradient (uneven diffusion) it's been for product type photography... e.g. even lighting of a curved surface. For portraits and the like it is usually a lot less critical.
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sk66
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Well, two at half power would be equivalent to one filling a softbox 2x in area at full power... I think that's the idea behind the statement. It also points out the potential advantage of using two instead.
Yes it was. And the refresh rates would be better. I believe Joe Mcnally even got lastolite to make a mount for their boxes that had three shoe mounts to fit speedlites onto.
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3 lights you say? Hold my beer...
This is the 4 SB900 lash-up I used before full size IGBT heads become available - to shoot dance (although I mainly used it with a large silver brolly tbh ). 1/4 power in the studio (giving the same as one SB900 at full power) was short enough to freeze dance if you were careful. It also gave me HSS outside for freezing motion with a combination of daylight and flash - using the shutter. One Yongnuo 422 receiver with a 4 into 1 sync cord sacrificed individual power control of the lights, but without a receiver under each light they sat further back in the softbox.
Mind you - Dave Black used 8 SB900's to freeze surfers - just bare heads zoomed to 200mm from a great distance. He used 2 x Quad light holders offset to make a ~circle of 8. With those Heath-Robinson radio-popper transceivers that captured the optical signals and repeated them over radio (and did the reverse at the flash end).
Amazing any light reached the subject at those distances tbh - very impressive.
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Those were the days! How much was four Nikon SB900 guns, or eight? Several grand. I had much the same with quad Yongnuos.
Dave Black was doing that ten years ago and if ever there was a clear message to manufacturers that flash was moving outdoors, there it was. Of the big established brands, only Profoto got the message. Then Godox came along with affordable prices and basically cleaned up.
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Yes. And both 3 and 4 flashgun holders have been available for many years, that could be used both within and without a softbox, but they were clumsy and poorly engineered.
As a matter of interest, I found a manufacturer who had invented what was roughly a ringflash consisting of four connected flashguns that would sync to a camera at 1/8000th. I remember spending several days in meetings with them, drinking what was, to a foreigner, undrinkable green tea in stifling heat, which turned out to be a complete waste of time and air travel, because he then decided to deal with another firm instead of us. If he is still around then he will regret that now, because the other firm went out of business and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
So, nothing new. People have been trying to overcome the challenges of slow recycling and limited power, together with other problems caused by the lack of barebulb flash for many years, sometimes at very high cost and always with complex setups that are likely to create technical challenges.
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Yep - I had one SB900 and bought 4 more, 8 years ago just to make this shot (instantly making it the most expensive photo I'd ever taken: I bought them used on eBay for an average of £250 each). :-
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I have never thought about using a Stofen on a Speedlight in side a softbox, I think I might borrow that hack !
Cheers
T
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It's a useful trick, but further reduces the limited amount of light.
There are other things that can be done too, for example you could fit a deflector that stops (most of) the light and bounces it back, where most of it will reflect off of the softbox walls and will spread around, not as nicely as from a studio flash, but better. The Lencarta folding softboxes have a built-in deflector that does that, it forms part of the opening mechanism. And Elinchrom used to have a deflector, designed for their studio flashes, that did a similar job very effectively - maybe they still do, I'm not up to date with their product range.
And you can make a very efficient one simply by gluing a piece of shiny material such as cooking foil to a bit of card or flat plastic, that works at least as well. You will need separation, at least a couple of inches from the front of the flash head.
And as nearly all flashguns have a swivel function you can swivel the flash head inside the softbox so that the light bounces off of one wall. It isn't perfect but it - and the other bodges - are all much better than just having the light pointed straight at the diffuser, because it really does need to bounce off of the walls.
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many thanks for the info and some sound advice which I will look into.
I do have a Godox 42x42 softbox with Bowens bracket to play with which I will try to use more this year !