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2017 DIYP Gift Guide – Lighting

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So, you’ve got your camera and your lenses, but now what? The days are getting shorter, and darker, potentially limiting what you can shoot, and for how long. Even when the weather is great and the days are long, the available light doesn’t always give you what you want and you want to augment it or obliterate it completely.

So, here we’ve put together some of our favourite lights and lighting accessories, including quite a few that we use ourselves on a regular basis for both photography and video work.

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Hands on review of the new Profoto A1 – Natural beautiful light. Easy to Use. Never miss a shot.

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We all know and love the legendary lighting manufacturer that is Profoto. For decades, they have produced and supported the most durable, powerful, and consistent lighting equipment for professional photographers around the world. In recent years, they have pushed the lighting industry forward with the introduction of the B1 and B2 and their OCF system.

These new lights have changed the way photographers work by allowing for unheard of flexibility and mobility. Ever the innovator, Profoto has given us something we’ve always wanted, but never thought to ask for.

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The $995 Profoto A1 speedlight is now official and here’s the first review

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The Profoto A1 speedlight we told you about a few days ago is now official. And yes, it’s just as expensive as we expected. At $995 buyers will have a pretty high level of expectation from this little flash. But it looks like it will stand up to the job just fine, and fits nicely into the existing Profoto ecosystem.

It looks to be about what you’d expect from a speedlight made by Profoto. But, what’s particularly interesting about it, is the shape of the head. But not only the shape, it appears to essentially have its own built in MagMod style accessory system. This review from photographer Neil van Niekerk walks us through the unit, its specs, features and capabilities.

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Photos show Profoto is expanding their range with first ever speedlight

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Well, this is an exciting bit of news. It looks like Profoto will soon be announcing their first hotshoe flash. Yes, that’s right, a Profoto speedlight. It’s a bold, but inevitable, move, I think. The existing flash companies have to do something to survive and compete, or they disappear. There’s so much more gear available now, and a lot more pressure on companies to innovate and really deliver what users want instead of what the company simply wants to sell.

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Profoto teams up with Fujifilm to bring TTL & HSS to Fuji cameras

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Well, they may have been lagging a little behind Godox and Cactus, but Profoto have finally caught up. Profoto have announced a new Fuji compatible Air Remote TTL-F trigger. And whereas Cactus and Godox had to reverse engineer their compatibility, this trigger is made in collaboration with Fujifilm themselves.

The Profoto AirTTL system was first announced in 2013. It was a pretty fantastic thing back then. Now that cross-compatibility outside of Nikon and Canon is well and truly here to stay, it’s nice to see Fuji getting some love from the higher end names in flash.

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Profoto’s new B1X offers bigger battery, brighter modelling light, and full range of power in HSS

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Profoto are calling the B1X the “new benchmark for on-location lighting”. And if it’s true, then it’s about time. Given that the $600 Godox AD600 seemed to keep up with the triple-the-cost Profoto B1 just fine, they sure needed to do something. And so they have.

The new Profoto B1X has a bigger battery, brighter modelling light and increased power range when shooting high speed sync. And it keeps the same price as its B1 predecessor.

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How to use gridded strip softboxes as your main light source

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When it comes to setting up flash for a portrait, one might usually grab a big octabox or beauty dish. Normally, we wouldn’t consider something like a strip softbox. Strip softboxes are typically relegated to rim light duties. But they can also be extremely effective as a main light source.

In this Profoto Tiny Talk, photographer Neil van Niekerk talks us through how he uses his gridded strip softboxes for lighting portraits. He describes it as the most powerful tool he has both on location and in the studio. And, indeed, it is an extremely versatile modifier.

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Watch: a small octa acts as a sail in extremely harsh wind

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By now, you probably know that you should sandbag your gear. I mean, who would want their gear flying on their face when they talk about sand bags?

But sometimes the wind is just too fierce. Not only for a light stand but for any sort of modifier. In the movie below, German photographers Flash bros set out to shoot a portrait. Only the wind was a bit too strong even to hold a Profoto B1 500 TTL strobe with a small Profoto 2′ Octa. You can actually see how the wind drags both gear and assistant away.

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Profoto’s new D2 TTL monolight leaves other “Fast” strobes in the dust

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We posted a review on this just earlier today, but here’s the full specs and info on the new Profoto D2 Monolight. Here’s the short version, though. Up to 20 flashes per second, action freezing flash durations as fast as 1/63,000ofh of a second and high speed sync with all shutter speeds all the way up to 1/8000th of a second. Oh, and it also does TTL, if you’re into that kind of thing.

With competition from companies like Godox hitting some flash manufacturers pretty hard lately, Profoto isn’t running scared. The new D2 flash basically stomps all over them. Of course, with great power come great big price tags, and these certainly aren’t cheap.

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Hands-on with the Profoto D2 AirTTL, the “World’s Fastest Monolight”

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When Profoto added TTL, High Speed Sync, and studio-level power to the Profoto B1 battery-powered monolight, it was revolutionary. But the newest flash, which the company describes as the “World’s Fastest Monolight,” is built to take the Profoto AirTTL system to the next level with even faster and more powerful lights. The Profoto D2 500/1000 AirTTL monolight may set the new standard for power and speed in studio lighting from everyone’s favorite Light Shaping Company.

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