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Today it’s about something you need but you could build yourself as well. This post will be about the HONL lighting gear for on camera flashes. Honl, a pro shooter from the USA, created a system of tuning your on camera flash. No softboxes, no umbrellas, no big lighting gear. It is all made for one purpose. SIZE SIZE SIZE!!!!

And Honl is right. It is harder to controll the light than to make it softer. Honl therefore made GELS, GOBOS and GRIDS.

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We just bought us a set of stuff we now want to present to you. Grids, Gels and the straps to fix the stuff to the flashes. These are the things we HIGHLY RECOMMEND to always have in your bag.

1/8” HONEY COMB
1/4” HONEY COMB
STRAPS
GEL KIT

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The strap is attached to the flash with no glue, just strapped around the head of the flash. You can always sell or buy the flashes as there will be nothing left of the HONL system.

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But you will certainly ask yourself why we are using something we already told everyone how to do it yourself. Everyone can build a grid out of straws, gels you can get from free filter packages directly from manufacturer LEE FILTERS. So, why do we pay a lot more money for this solution?

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The answer is very simple. On camera flashes are pieces of the every-day-working-gear of us. We really use them and we do need them as small little, portable flashes. And forming the light coming out of these flashes is every-day-work. Every DIY solution is functional but it is still not pretty robust. Take for example, the little filter gels. When taking them out of the filter box, we always lost the most important filters. You need a CTO filter and you don’t have the filter because you lost the little paper during the last shooting. Sure, you can write the name of the filter on it, but still, we got a lot of troubles with those little filters.
The Honl filters are bigger in size and they are already named.

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The same with the grids. Our selfmade grids never lasted longer than 4-5 shootings. After that, they fell apart or were “squeezed to death” in between our gear. The grids made by HONL have a very strong surrounding frame and the grid is nicely protected.

It is cheaper to buy one grid for 15 Euros than to build 20 grid yourself. It is not worth the time and it still costs some euros to buy the glue and straws. As you can see, it’s a matter of calculation.

And to end this posting, I will give you a very important hint for your future usage of filter gels. When working with maximum power of your on camera flash together with gels, you will clearly experience one not so nice result. The gels can melt down due to the heat of the flash. Every time you fire the flash, you damage your gel more and more. You can’t really change that fact unless you do the following:

Normally you attache the strap onto you flash plane to the front. Take a look at the picture below.

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Next time you use your gel on your on-camera-flash. You let some space free in between the gel and the flash.

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You can additionally move the strap forward over the end of the flash. Then you have the gel a lot more away from the flashtube. NO MORE MELTING DOWN YOUR GEL!!!!

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BYEBYE… Martin

TECHNICAL TUTORIALS Canon, CLS, ETTL, flash, Nikon, photo, shooting, strobes, Strobist, Technique

TECHNICAL-6: WATERPROOF… 10 CENTS ONLY

2 November 2009

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As the weather here in Germany is not as “funny and sunny” :-) as it could be, we got some special information for you.

As a photographer you sometimes can’t wait for Petrus to love you and bless you with some nice f16 weather. It happens to be like a non-written law, that the moment you get the best photos of a shoot, the weather kicks you out of the game. If you are prepared, you can smile and finish your shoot. Take a look at this.

It costs you 10 cent and some piece of good tape. But you should keep some things in mind.

When it rains, the the water is not only coming from the sky but it is also in the air. The humidity is really important and when there is to much water “in the air”, you can risk sparks and shortcuts in your flashes or generators. KEEP IN MIND THAT YOU RISK TO REALLY RUIN YOU WHOLE FLASH.
–> Our experience with our Rangers is, that it never happened to us, even in harsh rain.
You should also very careful with water from the bottom. The battery should not get wet at all although the Ranger stood in pure snow or water at some of our shootings and they all worked perfectly.
Try to avoid any holes in the plasticbags and if the rain gets stronger, than start to cover the whole flashhead with the bag. Keep in mind that the flash produces a lot of heat the moment you fire at great powers. This could melt your plasticbag in front of your flashhead. In this moment we use the big reflectors to get about 20cm away from the flashtube (minimum!!!).

It sounds funny but it is true. If you don’t want to shoot that way in the rain, keep it in you head for the next shooting when you are not sure whether the rain is going to start or not. You will stay a whole lot calmer with the “bag-protection-system” because you know that you won’t harm your flashes and you get some extra time in case the rain begins and you have to get your flashes to a safe and waterless place.

By the way… you want to see one of the results of the shooting above??? Here you go… there was nothing then some lonely mini-drops of water coming down the sky this day. But hey, that’s not the question. Normally we would have stopped the shooting and waited for Petrus to help us out…