Larry, take it from me: if you are buying a macro ring flash hoping to do anything other than shooting small objects well lit close up, you are wasting your money and time.
On your musician idea: if you are shooting them any further than a couple of feet away, by the point that the light reaches them you'll hardly be able to tell the difference between light from a macro ring flash and a regular hammerhead flash, except that the ring flash has a puny light output in comparison. Just put various light modifiers, lenses, grids, etc. on a AF360 or AF540 (or Vivitar) and you'll get a light almost indistinguishable from a macro ring flash at that distance. The macro ring flashes have no way to narrow the beam spread like their bigger brothers do either. The spread is probably 120 degrees or so. Ring flashes for studio work (portrait, fashion) are much larger in diameter and often have beauty-dish-like features so they are more focussed. On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > It's beginning to look like any inexpensive new ring flash I find is going to > have enough shortcomings that it won't have the flexibility for me to use it > for some of the things I'd want to use it for. As such, I'm going to put > getting a ring flash on the back burner in hopes that I find a good used one > sometime at a price that I'll be able to afford when it is available. > > One of the things that I'd like to try with one is gridding it to use it as a > narrow spot when photographing musicians. For composition reasons, it'd be > nice if it weren't dead center, but even if it means throwing away some > resolution, it would put the nominally most important subject in the sharpest > part of the lens, and half, or three quarters of the time, the one third > point you choose to aim the flash at would be wrong anyways. > > I've tried gridding my AF 540, but it's always a challenge to get it to aim > where I want it, with parallax and everything. > -- > Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est > > > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
