williamcarter
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 p.1 #1 · Profoto D1 monolights: mini-review | |
In case anyone's interested, I thought I'd do a quick write-up of my first impressions of the Profoto D1. I got the D1 500 Air Kit, which includes two D1 500 monolights, 2 light stands, two umbrellas, and the Profoto Air Remote and software.
Preliminary notes:
(1) The package comes in a really nice secure soft/rigid case. Not a big deal, I know, but it's a nice convenient way to carry the lights and stands/umbrellas. The whole package in the case weighs about 15-ish pounds, so fairly easy to carry. Would have been nice if they'd put wheels and a telescoping handle on the case for traveling, though.
(2) The umbrellas are medium-sized and, being Profoto, quite well constructed. I hardly ever use umbrellas as main lights, but they work nicely for blowing out a white background.
(3) The included light stands, though, feel surprisingly cheap and flimsy. Definitely not the quality of the other items. I used them on the shoot yesterday because I was in a hurry and didn't feel like digging out my other light stands, but I'll be using my other (better) light stands from now on.
(4) The heads themselves are very solid, well constructed, and intuitive, at least for someone who's used Profoto before (I used to have a Profoto D4 pack and heads). I figured out how they operate in about 10 minutes without needing to refer to the user's manual.
(5) The Air Remote took a little more time to figure out, but not much (especially once I looked at the manual!). It's fairly straightforward, with controls to adjust the power and turn off/on the heads either individually or in groups. It's much smaller than I pictured; it's a good (small but useable) size when sitting on the camera's hot shoe or in the hand.
So I get to the studio, set everything up (noticing the cheapo feel of the lightstands), slap the Air Remote on my camera, and start doing some test shots before the model arrives. First thing I notice is that there doesn't appear to be a locking mechanism to lock the Air Remote to the hot shoe. Granted, it's a pretty secure fit and didn't feel like it was gonna fall off. But still, how hard would it have been to include a hot shoe lock?
Second thing I noticed, when slipping the umbrella into one of the lights to use as a background light, is that there also doesn't appear to be a locking mechanism to hold the umbrella in its hole. (On most monolights I've used, there's a little screw on the bottom of the light that turns to secure the umbrella in the hole). Again, it didn't feel like it was going to fall out, but these things wear over time. Not a huge deal because I can just use a bracket on the lightstand that has a locking umbrella hole. But still.
Next I put my Profoto beauty dish on the second light. I could not for the life of me get the beauty dish to slide down even to the first zoom position on the head. I got it about 4 inches onto the head and it stopped. (I spent a lot of time trying to force it into different positions to get it on). This resulted in about a 3-4 inch space between the flash itself and the reflector disc in the middle of the beauty dish that reflects the light back into the pan. The problem could be my dish (perhaps the locking collar is too tight) but I don't think so because it slid all the way down on my D4 heads. It just seems like the circumference of the metal plate at the beauty dish opening is ever so slightly too narrow to let the head fully pass thru the dish opening. In other words, the metal circle that surrounds the flash head is just slightly too wide to pass through the metal circle that surrounds the opening of the beauty dish. I actually used a probably ill-advised amount of force to try to get it to go thru, but no luck. I was worried that this would result in the head being too far away from the reflector disc in the dish, resulting in light spill, but that doesn't seem to have been the case as far as I can tell.
Played around a bit to make sure I had the hang of adjusting the lights with the remote. No problem, worked smoothly. Using the one light with beauty dish as the main light for my test shots, I was getting about f8 at ISO 100 with the light about 6-7 feet from the object I was using for the test shots with the light turned up to about setting 8 (the power ranges goes in 1/10th increments, starting at 1 and going to 10). Not bad and if I can get f11-16 with it turned all the way up with the beauty dish, that's as high as I'll need for portrait work. The extra space between the head and the reflector disc might have resulted in a loss of efficiency though. The background was lit with the other head in the included umbrella, and I was getting f14 with it set at about 7 power, about 7-8 feet from the background.
Speaking of metering, I'm annoyed at having to hold the Air Remote in one hand and my Sekonic meter in the other hand in order to meter the flash. Would have been nice if they'd have made the Air system compatible with the built-in Pocketwizard triggers in Sekonic meters.
Starting shooting with the model. Recycling time was reasonable for portrait/fashion work. I didn't measure it objectively, but I never felt that I was ever waiting for the lights to be ready for the next shot. Air remote fired the strobes and made adjustments reliably every time. I didn't get a chance to test the Air software, but I will for the next shoot.
The resulting pics from the shoot came out well. That is, they looked how I expected shots with the Profoto beauty dish would look, which is good. I didn't notice any problems caused by the dreaded 77 degree built-in reflector not giving enough light spread for purposes of the beauty dish or the umbrella. I image this might be an issue when shooting with a large softbox, though, so I'll be ordering the glass dome that increases the beam spread.
All in all, I quite like the D1 lights.
A couple of photos attached for illustration. All shot with a Nikon D3X and either 180mm or 100mm lenses. Only post-processing to these is levels, curves, etc; I haven't had time to retouch them yet. Images processed in Capture One Pro and Photoshop. Main light from beauty dish at camera right/model's left. Little bit of fill from bank of windows to camera left/model's right. Background light was umbrella aimed at the white wall behind the model (yes, I will clone out the imperfections in the wall).
Please don't offer artistic critiques; that's not why I'm posting them. I realize that a couple are a bit "soft" -- no sharpening has been applied yet, but I still think there's a little bit of camera shake or slight misfocus visible at 100%. I also realize that the white wall isn't quite white yet.
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