Camera Electronic: February 2010

Did you know Camera Electronic is now the exclusive Profoto agent for Western Australia? I bet there is lots of other things you'd like to know about Profoto as well.

Simply looking at Profoto equipment you can see it stands out from the rest. The build quality is exceptional. The controls are simple, easy to use, with nice large buttons and dials. All the leads are heavy duty with the all important connections being similarly large and robust. This is gear made to be used, alot. Built to for heavy usage and built to last.

In actual usage there is many more reasons they excel. One important reason that anyone doing product or large numbers of individual portraits will love them is the complete colour and exposure accuracy. They are so colour and exposure accurate from shot to shot at all power settings that you can shoot, literally, thousands of photos and adjust them all in a huge batch. Not ever have to worry about sorting through and fixing subtle colour or exposure variations one by one.

Often it's the small things that make all the difference because it's the small things that you will have to do over and over again day in and day out. Don't put up with clunky mounting systems anymore. The Profoto light modifiers use an ingenious way of connecting to the heads. It is simply a durable rubber ring that has a clasp which squeezes it in place on the head. It is very sturdy and you never have to worry about it falling off. The real pleasure is in the simple, fast mounting and dismounting, it's just so quick and easy. The extra bonus of this system is that all the light modifiers can be zoomed in and out which adjusts the quality of light. So with one reflector you can have a wide or tight spread and get more usage out of less modifiers. Really increasing the creative potential without adding more equipment to carry on your next shoot.

With the huge range of excellent light modifiers you really are spoilt for choice in that department.

If location photography is your thing. You should look into packs such as the Acute B 600. With a nice compact battery and control unit, you can take 600ws of power almost anywhere. They even make an Acute B 600 R which has a built in pocket wizard receiver for remote triggering.

If 600ws isn't enough for you, don't worry Profoto has your back. Take a look at their Pro-7B1200 unit, it's a massive 1200ws of power with over 250 full power flashes from one charge. You can even attach two heads and shoot them both at 600ws each.

If you have really high demands and want 1200ws on location with fast recycle times and super fast flash durations then Profoto can help you there too. The Pro-B2 1200 ad Pro-B2 1200 R unit has 1200ws of power with recycle times of 0.04–1.8 s and ultra fast flash durations of 1/2200–1/7400 s. That's fast enough to freeze yourself jumping for joy thinking of the possibilities this creates. If you wanted to helicopter out to a volcano crater and get a pin sharp photo of a model tossing your old flash equipment into the boiling lava during the middle of the day. You'd have enough power at a fast enough duration to beat the sun and freeze those old units as they fly through the air never to bother you, your assistants or your clients again.

Ok so the next step here is to look at some of their mains powered units. Units like the Pro-8a 2400 Air. This one has the numbers 2400 in it's title because it's a 2400ws pack, makes sense right. That's an incredible amount of power, probably enough to be used as a weapon or enough to light an entire gymnasium. Whichever might take your fancy, it's up to you.

I can't leave out the D1 and D1 Air studio heads either. These are nice and compact with easy to use controls as you'd expect from Profoto. Coming in great kits of 1000ws 500ws or 250ws heads with stands, umbrellas, carry case and Air remote triggers if you want too.