Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Here are links to two quick pics of the new 8.5" reflector with the new 11"LT reflector, and the old style 7" reflector together. Top view, and bottom view. The new 8.5" is only 1/4" deeper than the 7", but has a full bowl shape, and a completely different interior texture. I really like the way the new 8.5" reflector works.

Maybe the pics will give you a better idea of whether or not the changes on the new 8.5" would affect a tight setup with your Bees. The new exterior finish provides a great fisheye mirror view as well. The reflectors are set in the middle of a 12' x 15' room, and pretty much captured everything there, including all 6'5" of me standing there in my shorts.. It's not too disturbing :)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2686/438 ... f201_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4057/438 ... b165_b.jpg

Voyager

Just trying to interject a little bit of humor and to be supportive of your efforts.

It's a common faux-Latin phrase intended to mean "Don't let the bast*rds get/grind you down". It is not however technically proper Latin.

It's a favorite among law students. I have it on a hat, and it makes me laugh every time I wear it.

Cheers

Ughhhh law students! We have one running our country (into the ground). No offense was ever taken and I appreciate the support. I prefer Buck Roger's secret decoder ring to Latin and lawyers.

So I don't have to repeat it all here, please checkout my explanation of all things Einstein and Luap here:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/ ... astmessage

Hmmm...... Between the lawyers elected to legislative political office, government employees directly voting for the politicians who will be (ir)responsible for approving their next fantasy contract, creating more government jobs resulting in more votes, and on and on with the endless pool of taxpayer cash available to condition youth, and buy votes, how long will it be before there are more Soviet style central planners and dependent subordinates than there are people who actually produce wealth here? Or will the elite central planners simply tax, regulate, and micro-manage commerce and liberty to death first?

Sorry for the off topic bit, but Paul throws a zinger remark in every now and then, and thinking about our President, the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority leader, and their (very) collective agenda makes my blood boil... Rant over.

Voyager

Paul, thanks for the continued updates and I'm very sorry to hear about Dr. Morgan. If I manage to hold out and not buy a couple of B1600's to tide me over, these will be my first "big" lights, so I'm definitely looking forward to the launch! Either way, I feel you provide a great value to your customers and I personally like your openness and the way you run your company and very much wish I worked with someone like you!

-Dan

Voyager, I hear you! When I was growing up in Russia I read George Orwell's Animal Farm, which of course was eerily reminiscent of how the Soviet Union was run. Having emigrated to the U.S., I was pretty happy except lately the Animal Farm feeling has started creeping back. I think that's the whiff of Socialism that you and Paul have been talking about. :-)

Although in all fairness the way Democrats and Republicans have been playing off each other in recent years (taking turns creating issues and rallying for change) has gotten so efficient it is scary. They take contributions from the same firms. "Privatizing profits and socializing losses" is not a new concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatizin ... ing_losses), and while now we're clearly in the socializing losses phase, I am beginning to see it as a part of the vicious cycle rather than a stand-alone, genuine conviction of a group of people. It will be straightforward and almost natural for a smart Republican president to step in next, saying "enough is enough" and invoking Reagan's name for fiscally conservative and back-to-basics capitalist way to rebuild the country. Then we'll have deregulation and a boom in certain sectors of industry, mainly benefiting the top, but spreading to lower classes (although perhaps progressively less than during the last cycles), followed by another bout of Wall Street excess and scandals, at which point the cycle repeats...

Rant over.

Alex,
I'm a passionate political animal at heart. It is such a powder keg of a topic though... I would hate to be kicked out of this fine forum, and drag you and others down with me because I see red when I see reds (you get the drift), so it might be best to let this topic quietly watch the sun set...

Then again, it's great to meet you here (you probably live less than 30 miles away from me). My grandparents arrived at Ellis Island on a boat from Eastern Europe in 1904, other relatives sailed this way after the revolution, and some remained in portions of the Soviet paradise consisting of Poland and Ukraine until, well, this very day. That family history provided me with a pretty solid foundation for growing up to understand the potential for evil relationships between governments and populations :).

I was always fascinated by Russia in general, considering that I grew up learning how to hide under my school desk if the Civil Defense siren ever warned that a Soviet H-bomb was about to fall on New York City (lots of good that would have done), and curiosity led me to learn the language, enjoy some lasting friendships with a few people in Moscow and cities east of the Urals, and even sit in a coach class airplane seat for 13 hours each way on my first visit to Russia in the mid 1990's. It's a beautiful country.

I was tempted to switch to Russian keyboard encoding to say hello, but the flurry of Latin didn't go over too well a few days ago, so I thought it might be better to keep it between the lines...... When the weather is nice, I make a hot dog run to the Nathans on Coney Island every now and then. If that's within your reach, maybe we will meet someday.

Voyager

I respectfully request that the politics be moved to a more appropriate forum. I too have a perspective on the difficulties of current times compared to other times, looming problems that grow more difficult to deal with over time, domestically and globally, and the decisions made to address them within the constraints that exist (and decisions made that create constraints).

But this really isn't the place to get into all of that. In the scope of this forum, I'm happy that the constraints of this epoch allow that I'll be able to create better photographs than before at a reasonable price, and PCB will make a reasonable profit for it's excellent efforts.

Best wishes to Dr. Morgan and all those close to him. I can wait for the lights.

Liels: I agree

Voyager:

Absolutely! I've been living in NYC since 1992 and am guilty of never having visited Coney Island. I've heard of those hot dogs on TV. Too bad this forum s/w does not appear to be configured for private messages, but here's my web site (contact info page): http://karasevstudio.com/contact.shtml

Let's touch base when it's warmer and more navigable :)

Back to the regularly scheduled programming, the Einstein. Actually as anxious as I am to see it, I wish it comes AFTER the present CyberCommander issues are resolved. I do not own either but the CC issues threads make it seem like it's not uncommon for the thing to just stop working seemingly spontaneously. Rather than see it happen during my shoot, I would rather "tumble through the earth" as Russians say ("go straight to hell" would be the non-commie-atheist equivalent i guess, LOL, although the Russian saying implies cringing from extreme personal shame rather than physical punishment :-)

On the other hand I do not know what % of active CC "power users" in fact run into stability issues. It may be that less than 1% of them have these due to weird setups or interference (which would be normal for any non-mil/aerospace/hospital grade product), or, conversely, it may be that most active users run into stability problems but not all report them here (some aren't on the forum, others just return the unit; others read the threads here and see their cases already covered). I simply don't know what to think, and the uncertainty worries me a tad.

My plan so far is to get the 2 Einsteins I have signed up for, together with CC and some modifiers and additional triggers, and really put the system through its paces this Summer. I think it's a good plan, except I fear that if I run into the stability issues with either CC or Einsteins and have to return the lot, I might not want to go back to my older lights and relying on flashes, and would end up spending 2.5x on a roughly equivalent Elinchrom system. Still, I have confidence in Paul, primarily because he is taking his time and what he says about old school sounds good to me. But I also would like to see concrete results, in the form of a CyberCommander firmware released SOON that fixes the issues reported thus far. Also would like to see a debug mode on this stuff to assist with telemetry gathering to improve the troubleshooting and fixing cycle.