Super Test: lighting kits
From the home studio to the great outdoors, there’s a growing range of flash kits to suit your needs. Matthew Richards sheds light on the best
We test a magnificent seven lighting kits, from sets for the studio, to battery-powered kits for location shoot
With prices starting at little more than a top-end flashgun, twinhead studio lighting kits give you a lot of bang for your buck. They’re vastly more powerful than a flashgun, and typically come with a full range of accessories, including lighting stands, cables and carrying bags, plus either softboxes or brollies. The Elinchrom and Interfit Honey Badger kits on test even include wireless RF triggers.
We’ve split our lighting kits into two groups – regular mains-powered studio flash and more portable, battery-powered location flash kits. With studio flash kits you just plug them into a wall outlet and crack on. The downside is that, unless you invest in an expensive generator or inverter, they’re useless for location shooting where you’re outdoors with no mains power.
Portable or ‘location’ flash kits are batterypowered, so you can shoot outdoors, as well as roaming freely at indoor functions, such as weddings, without needing to find mains outlets or leaving cables trailing behind you.
Some location kits have a power pack that’s separate from the head, and – in the case of the Elinchrom ELB 400 on test – the power pack also includes the control circuitry and interface. This enables the head to be very compact and extremely lightweight. However, a growing number of location kits have controls and even battery packs built into the flash head. They’re more like super-sized, ultra-powerful flashguns that enable trick modes such as TTL (Through The Lens) flash metering and HSS (High Speed Sync), enabling fast shutter speeds up to 1/8000th of a second. Now, that really is flash.