Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

[Mercutio]

Do you do studio work with strobes or flashes?

I have a (VERY) small studio space in what used to be an unused office or possibly utility room. It's about 8'x12' with about 2' of that space devoted to some furniture and props I like. The room has zero natural light, so to even walk in, I have to turn on a LED lamp. I do use flash when it's called for. Sometimes I need to overpower the sun for a second or need to take a striking portrait. I use Canon 600EX-RTs and the Yongnuo clones. I have several of both and I'm happy with them. The Yongnuo units take a fraction of a second longer to reset than the Canons and are a little bit harder on batteries, but they're all within 5% of one another in terms of how they behave. If I have time to set for it, I've been known to set them up so I can sneak in off-camera flash during concert photography.

I'm not in the business, but I'd have thought that with the advent of powerful, efficient, LED lights, that strobes would be phased out?

Constant modifiers are a lot more convenient for video work, but they also create heat and clutter on a shoot, which is not ideal for just photo use.
Because of the particulars of what I wind up doing, I have and use both, with my most powerful lights being 200W RGBW Bowens-mount lights and a bunch of other 30W or 60W lights meant to go on stands and little 15W guys that I can hand-hold or stick on any magnetic surface. I'm usually trying to simulate either full daylight or dusk/dawn lighting in less than ideal conditions, like shooting in a basement.

My most used tools for video lighting are actually gaffer tape, and translucent and opaque shower curtains.

 

[LunarMist]

In South America they used a bunch of those Chinese Yonougo flashes and they were not very reliable. I think there were 16-20 in use and a number of spares, but they kept overheating and slowing down or misfiring so they were swapping around all the time. At a similar event in the same location the Canon RT-EX flashes just kept going all day with some battery changes.

 

[Mercutio]

I can't say that my Yongnuo flashes have been anything but reliable. I switch them out with the Canons freely.

 

[jtr1962]

A flash is much brighter for a short duration. For example even a basic shoe-mount flash has about 60Ws of energy that can be delivered in about 1/1000th of a second. If you assume a sync speed of 1/250th it is like having a 15,000W light on for that 1/250th. Even if an LED is twice as efficient you would need huge lights for the same intensity and when you consider 200/400/800/1600/3200Ws strobes it is nearly impossible to get that much light from LEDs over a short duration.

Obviously flash/strobes are not used as much since cameras/processing are better at high ISO, video is more prevalent, and many markets have lower standards and budget, but there are plenty of applications. Indoors you use modeling lights and outdoors mostly just review the images.

You're forgetting one thing. Strobes are omnidirectional. A lot of their light is wasted. LEDs can be focused fairly efficiently. Overall that probably means LED is 5 times as efficient or more in terms of the amount of light delivered to the target.

Also, the limiting factor of LEDs for strobe use is probably the bond wires. They would need to be heavy enough to carry some tens to hundreds of amps for a few hundreths of a second.

Then you have the duration. It doesn't matter if a strobe can deliver its output in 1/1000th of a second if the exposure time is 1/250th sec. A LED delivering 40% of the output for 2.5x as long will put the same amount of light energy on the target during the exposure period.

Last thing is aren't cameras WAY better now at taking good pictures at lower light levels? That's why I agree with Dave that by now strobes should have been mostly phased out. You just don't need to flood a target with hundreds of thousands of lumens. A few thousand will be enough to light it adequately. And LEDs can easily deliver that on a continual basis.

The only niche use I see for strobes is if you need to stop action taking place over very short time intervals. How much photography actually involves that?

Last reason why I'd be all in on phasing out strobes is a pet peeve of mine. It's the idiots taking pictures at places like stadiums who don't bother to turn off their strobes. At the distances they're shooting, the strobe adds a negligible amount of light. It might be nice if cameras at least did this automatically. Once you focus on a target where the camera determines the strobe is useless, it simply doesn't fire.

 

[LunarMist]

High ISO may be fine for general use at low-medium image quality, but it you want high image quality high ISO is not the place to be. If you can get say 200Ws out via LEDs in ~1/500th (to use 1/250th reliably) at a reasonable cost, I'd buy one.
1/250th is close to what is expected with a flash duration 1/500th or faster. Of course in some cases you can try to keep everything still, but you are proposing 1/100th which will cause some motion blur too often with most living subjects.
For now, how can you beat a 200Ws budget flash like the AD200 for $300? There are also similar flashes at higher power levels. There are various relectors, some more or less efficient but many are directional if you need it. The 60-200Ws units usually use relatively small sources and good reflectors. A 1600Ws monolight doesn't have to be super efficient, but the quality of light, support system, etc. is more important.

 

[ddrueding]

Makes sense. The only indoor environment I shoot in is my office, and I just covered the walls and ceiling with Nanoleaf smart panels that are individually addressable. I've created some scenes that I use regularly and assigned them in Smarthome to buttons on my desk. If I turn them all 100% 5200K at once the place is well lit enough for heart surgery, but you are right that it starts to get warm.

 

[Mercutio]

Sigma apparently just launched a 28-105/2.8 for Sony that costs half what the RF mount Canon version does, $1500 MSRP. It's big and heavy, but that's implied just by having the name Sigma on it. It's in One True Lens territory for an awfully lot of use cases.

 

[LunarMist]

Canon has a 24-105/2.8, not 28-105/2.8, and it has a tripod mount. Are you getting the Sigma?

And in case yoiu think that is new, Tamron has a 28-105/2.8 in the 1990s. https://www.keh.com/shop/tamron-28-...d-176d-lens-for-canon-ef-mount-82-686281.html I pre-ordered one was very disappointed with it. MILS designs have many advantages for those kinds of lenses.

 

[LunarMist]

Makes sense. The only indoor environment I shoot in is my office, and I just covered the walls and ceiling with Nanoleaf smart panels that are individually addressable. I've created some scenes that I use regularly and assigned them in Smarthome to buttons on my desk. If I turn them all 100% 5200K at once the place is well lit enough for heart surgery, but you are right that it starts to get warm.

How many watts is that?

 

[Mercutio]

Canon has a 24-105/2.8, not 28-105/2.8, and it has a tripod mount. Are you getting the Sigma?

Not with the old-ass Sony APS-C body I have, but if I had an A7r4 or the like, I'd be all over that thing.

 

[LunarMist]

It weighs 1kg, is 6' long, and has no tripod mount option that I can see. A removable collar would be great. Is the Simga zoom optically correct, without any of that computational crap like Canon, Nikon, etc. sometimes use?

 

[Mercutio]

1kg is a pretty normal weight for a Sigma zoom. It's within the range of normal weight for something I'd hand-hold or balance on the body. It's not the 3kg 120-300 that has to have a tripod mount.

I know it's not parfocal, so you don't keep focus while you're zooming, but I'm not a pro video guy, so I'm perfectly happy just to keep focus when my subject is moving through the frame without changing the focal length to begin with. Leave the fancy tricks to phones and the full time video guys.

 

[ddrueding]

How many watts is that?

Lots? Certainly hundreds when all on, but reasonable use is with a couple off and the rest in the 15-25% range.

 

[LunarMist]

It's not as bad as those 500W incandescent photo lights that lasted about 6-12 hours. Two of those would heat a room really fast.

 

[LunarMist]

The a7RIV is 5 years old. The sensor has too many pixels for even 8K and rolling shutters extraordinaire. Maybe get the a7IV for videos.
The a7r5 is current, but has the same old sensor Mechanical shutter mode and compressed RAW are need to get the full 10FPS.

 

[Mercutio]

That's the "or the like" part, LM.

 

[LunarMist]

Do you like the C80? It's limited obviously to not overtake the C400.

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[Mercutio]

I am actually not sure what direction I would go if I wanted a dedicated video camera. I still want to know what Nikon is going to do with Red.

 

[LunarMist]

Most of these products are at the rental houses so you can try a system before committing to it.

 

[LunarMist]

My other R5 II is stuck on limbo of the FedExes. Somehow notifications are 4 hours in the FUTURE, even though it has supposedly reached my time zone as of yesterday. I could ride a bicycle there and back in one day rather than the three days left until delivery.

 

[Mercutio]

I had a package of fiber optic cables USPS'd to me from Schaumberg, IL last week. It was last scanned in Arizona and I do not understand why or how that happened.

 

[LunarMist]

The battery situation is disgusting. Somebody should be managing the engineers and updating the FW.