Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I know I've read something about this before but I've been probing around here for a while and can't find the answer.
I've always been a hobbyist when it comes to photography but I've been getting a lot more demand lately. One of the requests I get are for portraits similar to this one that I took. I'm pretty pleased with the results but it was achieved by using my Canon 580EX II flashes so I had to use a fairly high ISO to be able to use the f stop I wanted and a power setting low enough to allow the flashes to fire a couple of times before slowing to recycle. If you look at the photo you can see some of the noise in there. It's not bad, and I could probably get away with it, but I'm a perfectionist. Now I'm considering my lightly used White Lightning X1600s and picking up a few of the Einsteins but only if they're an effective solution for me.

Now, to the point.....
My shooting conditions would be pretty much no ambient light contributing to the shot, this one was taken after sunset. I'd want my key to be my white PCB beauty dish (the previous generation dish that was a little more solid) about 5 feet from my subject. My kicker and rim lights will be the standard reflector. I want to be around f/8 at a minimum and f/11 at max @ an ISO no greater than 200 (100 ideally). My question would be, at approximately what power setting would the Einstein be on, and how many consecutive shots could I get off with a VML before it wasn't able to keep up? If I could get 4 shots off at f/8, ISO 200 out of an Einstein on a VML with a white beauty dish (willing to buy a silver if needed) at 4 or 5 ft I'm taking the plunge.


Thanks for your time.

Riley Hooper Senior Photo by Brendan.Dillon, on Flickr

An E640 at 5 feet and ISO 100 with a silver beauty dish with a deflector and no sock will give you f11 @ about 20Ws at ISO 100.

Move to ISO 200, or f/8 and you will be at about 10Ws.

When using one E640 on one VML, you can get about 7 frames per second pace at 14 Ws. This would be a constant rate until the battery was drained or something overheated (unlikely). If you increased the pace, the images would progressively get darker until you reach the point where the flash only fires from the amount of charge accumulated between shots.

In other words, if we assume 7 frames per second, each frame would have to be .07 seconds apart. You could not fire 7 shots in half a second, wait half a second, then fire 7 more in a half second and expect them to be evenly exposed.

If you used a VLX, you could increase that to about 10fps at 40Ws.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much.