Location Lighting with the Elinchrom ELB 400

Lesson 1: Introduction
Published: October 2015 with Scott Kelby

Duration: 1 hour 48 minutes

About Course

Take your studio lighting game on location! Join Scott Kelby for an action packed class on how to use the Elinchrom ELB 400 in a variety of locations. From a local golf course to the Nevada desert to a wedding venue, Scott shows you all kinds of ways to leverage the portability and power of the ELB 400 to unleash your creativity. Scott starts off by introducing the kit he uses on location, explaining the various components, and showing you how they work together. From there it is location, location, location, as Scott demonstrates how this kit works by putting it through its paces indoors and out. At the end of the class Scott shows you three very cool special effects modes this kit can do that are a lot fun to see in action. All along the way Scott digs deep and shares lighting tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your time and get the best results possible.

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Hi everybody Scott Kelby here and welcome to location lighting secrets. I've put together a class for you where we're going to go on location, sure you have some great camera tips, we're going to do some live shoots, we've got a whole bunch of stuff that we're going to do and it's based on the actual kit that I use myself. Now the kit that I use in the field has pretty much been my go-to kit for many, many years, is an upgrade from what I used to use. So I used to use the Ranger Quadra from Elinchrom, you guys have probably seen me doing all kinds of stuff on location everything from weddings, to portrait shoots, to athlete shoots all that different stuff. You've probably seen me use it a million times, well this is the upgrade to that, it's the ELB 400 and it's a tremendous upgrade, it's really really awesome and I actually I've got access to all kinds of lighting gear, I have a bunch of lighting gear but this is the one I choose to go with, I can use anything and this is just the one I've fallen in love with. It's got so many great things about it and we're going to kind of go through that. I'm going to start this class by just going through the kit, so you understand what it's about, why I chose it, why I like it, all that kind of stuff and then we'll actually go out into the field and do these. We've got four location shoots and in there I'm trying to put in lots of lighting tips and techniques and things that you can use out in the field yourself alright, so that's the basic scope of it. We're going to start off by looking at why would we take a battery pack out at all, why I'm I using a battery pack like instead of speed lights cause there are certain times that I've used speedlights, I've even done a class on speedlights here in KelbyOne but one of the things why you want to take a battery pack and why you want to do this. One of the big things is power, the power difference is staggering, you're taking studio lighting out on location. When you think about it, how much power is there really in a speedlight? Well you probably already know there's not a bunch but it's around 35 watts seconds on the low end to about 60 watts seconds right, 35 to 60. When you use the ELB 400 this thing has 424 right, it's got 424 watts seconds this is huge, to give you an idea how big that is, it's basically a 6.9 stop range of light, where a speedlight generally has less than a one stop range so that's pretty big. Also on the low end you can go down to 7 watts, so you can get it really really low powered, well what does that allow you to do? It allows you to be able to get F stops like F2.8 inside the studio or out on location and things, so you can get that nice creamy soft depth of field behind your subject that you really couldn't get with most other lights, so that's a really big thing. Another thing I love about it and this is a really important thing is that it comes with a modeling light, so you can actually turn on the modeling light, you can use it. Now we use the modeling light you're going to see later in some of our classes for some clever things but being able to see your subject and see where the light's going to be almost get like a preview of what your light's going to be before it goes off, is tremendously helpful. Big thing too is, of course you see the size of the battery even though this is super small and super light weight, you get way more pops than you would from a battery powered speedlight by far and by the way that's the word we're going to use pops. That means how many times the flash fires, you get so many more and you're not going to be carrying around tons and tons and tons of Double A batteries everywhere you go, so that's really really big. The other thing is and this is really really important, there's more modifiers you can use in fact, so this is an Elinchrom ELB 400 an Elinchrom has this huge range of softboxes, you guys have seen me use them over the years. There's an adapter you can get, in fact here's the adapter right here, this little adapter lets you use basically any Ellinchrom Softbox they make, so the whole Rotalux line just attaches right on to this very, very tiny flash head. So it's very very versatile, it also doesn't weigh very much and I'm going to talk about the battery itself here in a minute but that's the basic kit we're going to use which is a battery pack and a very tiny, super light weight, super small flash head. The flash head, this is the actual flash head we're going to use, is way smaller and way lighter than any speedlight you're going to use, it's very, very light weight. Alright let's talk about the battery, okay so on the old Quadra which they actually do believe it or not, sell the Quadra still, it's just one kit and it comes with the old lead acid battery if you buy it brand new today, comes with the old lead acid battery but if you get the ELB 400 they now come with this lithium iron battery and there is an advantage to the lithium iron batteries themselves, number one it's much lighter, it provides way more pops and it recharges faster, so that's kind of a nice advantage of the ELB 400 lithium battery. The battery this is it, separately just pops right in here, to the bottom of the case and it's pretty simple to put together obviously. Here's the difference though when I say that it's lighter weight, so the lead acid battery, the old battery the one that comes if you buy Quadra today is 4.4 pounds and you get 120 full power pops. Now you're not going to be running your flash at full power all the time but it could give you, if you need it to be at full power you're out in the middle of the day, super bright day or whatever your trying to just blow your power out, you can get 120 full power pops. The lithium is half the weight, it's only 2.2 pounds, so it's much much lighter and you get 320 full power pops, so there's a tremendous advantage to the lithium iron batteries. I also read that the kit itself is the lightest kit available right now if you're going to get a battery powered kit, this is the lightest way to go. Now of course this comes with the battery and there are kits where you can get two batteries but you can also just buy an extra battery so if you just think, I don't know if 320 full power pops is going to cover me, you can get a backup battery. Some other advantage of this is, I read this is, there's a UK magazine that basically was comparing a bunch of these type of portable good quality studio things and they chose the Elinchrom to be the most color accurate. Why does that even matter? Why do you care about it being color accurate because you don't want to go into Photoshop or Lightroom and spend all your time changing individual frames because it wasn't accurate and sometimes the Kelbin is changed as you're shooting, you want consistency every time you read about anybody talking about a portable flash, they're always talking about, is it consistent? Is the color consistent? Is the power pop the same time every time? Is it always going to be F8, F8, F8, F8 or is it going to move up and down and so I think color accurate and consistency is really important. Also since this is for location stuff right, you want it to be like really really rugged out the weather. This is designed to take rough weather and rain and stuff as long as the ports are closed, you can be out in a really bad condition shooting and the whole thing still works, so that's really, really important for those. So that's kind of the battery, you'll see me actually doing some of the settings and stuff, it's really pretty simple as far as this goes. I'm going to go through how we will use different flashes and heads and stuff with it but it has an LED window which makes actually navigating it super, super easy in fact it kind of reminds me of an iPod in the way that it works. Remember the old white iPods that you used to get from Apple, kind of works in that same way, it's really, really simple to get through. So, we're going to look at that next but I want to talk about some of the features here that you should want to know about working with heads and a battery pack.

Scott Kelby

Scott is the President and CEO of KelbyOne, is also the original "Photoshop Guy", is the editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, Conference Technical Chair for the Photoshop World Conference, Training Director and instructor for KelbyOne Live Seminars, and author of a string of bestselling technology and photography books.