The Blog of Photographer Jacob Vorpahl.
When I was in North Carolina with my wife and some of her family, I had my first chance to set up my new Christmas present and test it out. I really wanted to take some pictures of Sarah’s sister’s newborn baby Hayden and his mother, Angela, was more than willing to offer him up (what mother wouldn’t be?). So I pulled out the Westcott softbox and we went to work. I would like to say most of the flash settings for the SB800 inside the softbox are 1/4 power, but I don’t know that for sure. We were so focused on getting baby Hayden to sleep that I honestly lost track of what the settings were. The cute little guy, who usually didn’t open his eyes that much, would not close them and sleep and therefor kept moving around, namely putting his hands in the way of his face. Cute to watch, but frustrating when you want to get a shot with his face in it.
In the near future, I plan on running this thing through its paces and finding out just how much light it eats and what its dispersion is. I’m also going to put up a comparison between this and a medium sized umbrella for good measure. Check back for that a little later.
[...] Initial shots with the Westcott Apollo Mono 28″ softbox [...]
Hi Jacob
Just wanted to thank you for going to all the trouble to document this experiment and make it available to the public at large.
Your results are very impressive, and compelling. I’m blown away by the quality of light this smallish softbox produces, though not at all too surprised. Generally, I play with a larger softbox in the studio (48×36) but have been known to tote around a much smaller (16×12) softbox for use on location when studio strobes and larger equipment simply isn’t practical or feasible. Even my small softbox can produce good results, though not quite as flattering in light quality as the larger unit.
The Westcott Apollo looks like a fairly well built unit, definitely more rugged than my small 16×12 unit. I’m going to have to seriously take a closer look at it. Yes, it looks that good
)
Beautiful work on the capture and processing of the images above. Quality work, Jacob
Cheers
~Gary
Many thanks for this write-up, it’s exactly what I was looking for, and pretty much what I had expected.