Question for the Stills Photographers - Softboxes & Octas

[Dominik Muench]

Hi Guys


I'm wanting to buy a couple of softboxes and octas for my portable lighting system....I am using Hensel gear and mostly the Hensel Porty and while I love their gear...my credit card does not....plus I shoot in a lot of windy, dusty and sandy locations where I really dont want to take any expensive studio grade softboxes and light formers.
I noticed that elinchrom has a few cheap softbox options...well at least cheaper than the Hensel gear. but im confused about the mounts. obviously Hensel and Elinchrom have different systems but I heard there are adaptors.

Does anyone use Hensel gear by any chance and can suggest a sturdy adaptor ring system and a brand of softboxes thats affordable and portable ?

thanks for any pointers.

 

[Lee Saxon]

The way the adpaters work is that every brand of light modifier builds adapters ("speedrings") to allow their gear to mount on every brand of light (or most of them). There should really be some kind of standardization, but that's life...

Anyway, Photoflex makes some good affordable light modifiers and they do have Hensel adapters (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=photoflex+hensel&N=0&InitialSearch=yes&sts=ma).

By the way, if you're also having doubts about taking your expensive lights out into rough conditions, check out Alien Bees. They're cheap and surprisingly hard to destroy.

 

[Dominik Muench]

thanks for that lee. I just bought a photoflex adaptor and softboxes from B&H.

I'm really more worried about the light shaping gear as it breaks quite easy during stormy weather on location and is quite unreasonably expensive in mu opinion....the same softbox from hensel would have cost me 3 times the money than what photoflex charges....for all my location work I use a hensel porty which is incredibly sturdy...been dragging it to the beach now for years, its got sand and saltwater in it and still works.
I started out with alienbees years ago and while I think their gear prices are very reasonable, its more gear for permanent setups in studios...if you have to break it down and take it with you a lot its a pain in the ass to set up quick...at least AB gear I used to use years ago.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Agreed, I gave up on AB light modifiers after about two photoshoots, but I loved the strobes themselves. Had them for almost a decade before they died and I replaced them with the new AB's (Einstein), which I think are the best strobes out there.