Irvine Portrait - Irvine Photography

I HATE those little hotshoe adapters for cameras that don’t have a PC socket; they always seem to be sliding out of the shoe, and unreliable with missed flashes.  So for the new Norman strobe setup I ordered, I searched for a cord that had male hotshoe on one end, and 1/4 ‘ mono plug on the other.   Guess what?  Nobody makes them!!!

Luckily I found a fantastic site called http://www.paramountcords.com where they have all kinds of custom cables you can order with their “cable builder” website.  You simply choose the connector on the left end, the connector on the right end, and the size/type of cable (coiled or straight, how many feet long) and presto, you can order your cable right on line.  This means I have a good sturdy solid connection between my hotshoe and my strobe so no misfires!  It cost me $56 and for a heavy duty item like this it’s worth the price!

Well, I bit the bullet and bought the Norman “manual” strobe system because I have never been happy with the ETTL Canon flashes, the output and the inconsistency I couldn’t ever seem to get sorted out.

http://normanlights.com/battery_systems_compkits.asp

The weird thing was I could not find hardly any good definitive technical information (like, what kind of sync cord does this thing need?  Do I need an adapter for my Canon hotshoe?)

Turns out the website is unbelievably bad, dead links all over the place.  They make some of the finest workhorse portrait/wedding lighting around, but they don’t have much in the way of a marketing department I guess since they got purchased by Promark International.

But it has 400WS, Guide 168 at ISO 100 and should blast some serious light when I do my upcoming Beckman Coulter event.  I prefer manual shooting anyway, so this is right up my alley; a portable studio strobe!

This model doesn’t include the built-in Pocket Wizard, but I have 4 of them I can just plug in if I want to use as an off-camera light, bounce, etc.  I can’t wait to play with it!!

A colleague asked about finding some flexible clamp solution for doing macros, since even small gusts of wind move the plant beyond the intended plane (when DOF is a big deal it is key to a good flower macro.)

 So, I recommended he read this article>

Soil anchor and “plamp” for macrophotography

Introduction
In my search for useful parts for my macro flash bracket project, I also came across some plastic clamps which reminded me of what Wimberley uses for their Plamp® and McClamp uses for their Clamp® and Stick®.  Both are basically just clamps on a gooseneck, used to fasten plants (or whatever you are photographing), reflectors, or whatever you need to stay put while you are working. These products do all use the flexible Loc-line® water hose which I used for my flash bracket.  The anchor is very simple to make and if you have the parts anyway it takes you no more than 30-60 minutes depending on how fancy you want it to be.

Full story: http://www.thufa.net/jo/misc/m_anchor.htm

Also you could go to Wimberly’s http://www.tripodhead.com/products/plamp-main.cfm and get one for $36