Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I take photos of dancers and sometimes it is very hard to get the right moment so I sometimes rely on shooting at 9/10 fps for fast moves and pick the best shot.

Let's say I need a burst of 4 shots at 10 fps. If I use the new Einstein with a CC, what power setting on the Einsteins would enable the strobes to do these 4 shots? Just curious roughly how much light I would get.

Do you have a chart of flash duration vs power setting for the Einstein. I read that at 1/2 power it's already as short as 1/2000 which is plenty for me. But I couldn't find flash durations for other power settings.

50WS (about the same as a speedlight at full power) will get you 10 fps continuously with consistent color and exposure and a t.1 around 1/10,000. For bursts of four or give shots you could go up to about 80WS at 10fps, with a slight successive exposure loss with each shot.

The t.1 flash duration VS power is published in the manual, available on our website I believe.

thanks a lot. Found the manual and the chart. It's exciting to see how well the Einstein will be for action photography!

If that isn't enough power for you, but you can afford to double the number of flash units you use, one tool I have employed before is the SpeedCycler feature of the Pocket Wizard MultiMax where you can alternately fire separate zones. That would double the maximum possible firing rate at any given power level.

Ronald

Basically you will get similar flash duration VS power setting on Einstein as you would with a speedlight, but at about 12 times the power . . . most speedlights are in the 50WS range. You'll also get about 1/10 to 1/20 the recycle time per WS since typical speedlights cycle to 50WS in 2-3 seconds VS around 1/8 second for Einstein.

I am very interested in the fast frame rate issue also. I use AB 1600 for fill light at indoor pools while doing underwater photography we are shooting at 3FPS but are having the same issues with the alien bees as far as fluctuating output. Where would we be power setting wize to get a constant out put at the slower frame rate with einstien?

Using the example above for 10fps, you should be able to do 3fps at around 1/4 power, or 160Ws.

so would the same go for an AB 800 at 1/2 power then?

but wouldn't it take about 1/2 the full recycle time?

...what are the recycle times? I can't find them listed anywhere except in the Einstein description...

An AB would recycle about twice as fast at half power, however, the Einsteins would be a bit more precise in output firing that fast continuously, particularly at very low power.

Which recycle times are you looking for? Bees or Einstein?

AB at 640WS = 2 seconds, Einstein at 640WS = 1.7 seconds. At 1/8 power (80WS) Einstein is about 1.7/8 = .215 sec = 4-5fps possible.