Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Profoto has today announced AirX, a new update for the Profoto App which lets your iPhone communicate with the Profoto B10 series strobes. It synchronizes over Bluetooth and Profoto says it’ll let you “sync the full power of the flash tube” all the way up to 1/25,000th of a second.
At the moment, the feature only appears to be available for the iPhone. Whether or not that will change in the future is currently unknown.
With cameras and lenses out of the way, it’s time to light your scene. So, you’ll need lights. I’ve noticed a distinct trend over the last year towards continuous lights, so while there are some flashes and strobes in this list, we’ve put quite a few of our favourite continuous LED lights in this year’s list, too.
Profoto calls it “The world’s smallest studio light”. Most of the rest of us just call it the $1,100 speedlight. Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about the Profoto A1X. An update to the original $1,000 speedlight, the A1X has also proven to be a fairly popular light amongst Nikon, Canon, Sony and Olympus shooters. Thus far, though, Fuji users had been left out in the cold, at least on the hot-shoe.
No more, though. Fujifilm has announced compatibility with the new Profoto A1X AirTTL-F designed specifically for use with Fujifilm cameras. Support also comes for the Off-Camera Flash Kit, which includes the A1X AirTTL-F as well as the button-free Profoto Connect Wireless Transmitter.
With smartphone cameras getting better and more widely used, there are more and more accessories for mobile photography on the market. Profoto has decided to jump on the bandwagon and it has just announced two pocket-sized speedlights. Profoto C1 and C1 Plus are aimed at smartphone photographers, and these tiny, yet powerful lights can fit a palm of your hand.
Profoto has announced the new B10 Plus strobe, doubling the power of the B10 from 250Ws to 500Ws. It’s a little longer than the B10, coming in at 9.3″ long vs 7″, but offers 10 stops of range, up to 1/50,000 sec t.05 flash duration in freeze mode, and up to 100 metres wireless triggering.
Most flash triggers today have a massive array of buttons and doohickies with a fancy LCD screen. Just look at the Godox XPro. According to Adorama’s research, photographers want more buttons, not fewer. Profoto’s research, on the other hand, suggests that photographers find such systems far too complex and would prefer to have none at all.
So, taking that feedback onboard, Profoto is taking an Apple approach to minimalism and has today announced the Profoto Connect. A flash trigger with absolutely no buttons on it whatsoever, nor an LCD screen.
Launched in 2017, the $1,000 Profoto A1 was a pretty unique design amongst speedlights. Finally, the world had a round head speedlight – something that many photographers had been asking for, for at least the last couple of decades. Now, Godox is getting ready to start shipping their new V1 round head speedlight, launched at Photokina 2018. But Profoto calls foul play.
According to Fotosidan, Profoto is accusing Godox of intellectual property theft, specifically patent infringement, with the design of the Profoto A1. And they’re threatening to sue if Godox doesn’t pull the unit immediately.
Despite Bowens being back, Godox seems to have reached something of an arrangement with them. So it looks like they’re turning their sites more towards Profoto shooters with the announcement of a new adapter for the Godox AD200 that allows you to use Profoto accessories with either the bare bulb or H200R round heads.
The new portable Profoto B10 250 AirTTL strobe has officially been announced. It’s a tiny 250Ws strobe, about the size of a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens that can easily fit in your camera bag. It has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, with a colour adjustable continuous light for video.
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