As a strobist – no matter professional or beginner you need light modifiers. These light modifiers can include shoot through umbrellas, bounce umbrellas, soft boxes, octagons, reflectors, etc.
And of course, you want a fairly affordable and as durable solution as possible. This may include making your own, or buying over the internet rather than walking in your local friendly overpriced high street shop (most definitely in UK or Sweden).
If you like to get your hands dirty and generally interested in how things click, you should most certainly check out DIY Photography site, where professionals and amateurs alike share fun and sometimes even rather bizarre ideas. Yet the results are not ceasing to surprise.
If you on the other hand simply want to buy something cheap from eBay I would advise you to stay put. Surely by now you witnessed the abundance of Chinese made items. Studio equipment is not exclusion – multitude of sellers fight for your attention offering minimum price and free delivery. But are the goods they are offering up to scratch?
I frequently order Chinese manufactured adaptors for Olympus, Nikon and Contax lenses which do “exactly what it says on the tin” – in other words they are just as they are advertised, and I am not going to complain. Perhaps the biggest lie in the advertisement of those is the phrase “Quality Japanese steel” which essentially means Chinese buying scrap metal from Japan (you can clearly see mountains of rusting scrap around Nagoya, Aichi prefecture awaiting Chinese boats), smelting it with some other rubbish and serving it to us. So now you know.
There is other type of merchandise which involves more or less fragile or awkward construction – for instance a soft box, generally comprised of the soft box itself (strengthened fabric with reflective inner coating, diffuser(s), speed ring, perhaps a flash adaptor and various bits and bobs to “help” you put it together. I was foolish enough to order one of those from Gadget Infinity – a Hong Kong based retailer of photography and lighting equipment.
Cactus Wireless Flash Trigger Set V4
Don’t get me wrong – certain items manufactured or sold by Gadget infinity are actually decent products. Take for instance Cactus Wireless Flash Receiver/Transmitter. It’s a wonderful device allowing you to control many portable flashes or strobes without tripping over and strangling yourself and/or your model with release cables at a fraction of a cost of Pocket Wizards. Yes, Pocket wizards are industry standard and they offer so much more, but there is always a matter of delicate balance between contents of your wallet and what you are actually trying to achieve. Surely, launching an artificial moon into orbit just so you can light up a client’s alpine chalet that little extra never crosses your mind, really?
The Kit
Now, back to the soft box. The originally ordered package contained the soft box itself, double diffusers, 4 sprung steel rods, plastic speed ring and metal flash adaptor. When I saw the speed ring, alarm went off in my head almost straight away. And for a good reason – 2nd time I put the soft box together the speed ring broke. The tension in the rods forming a skeleton of the soft box simply tore the fragile plastic to bits. On top of that, the Velcro tape used for locking the last pin during the assembly got half-torn, again due to the tension.
After a certain amount of negotiations with the seller I arranged a replacement and left it at that – after all it all seemed very clearly explained in the mails and the assistant confirmed the details. Even better – the shop offered me a new speed ring made of metal. “Great!” I thought. Boy, I was so wrong.
The flimsy f***er in action
Imagine my surprise followed by frustration when I unpacked the package and discovered the original soft box? Same loose piece of Velcro. On top of that, the new speed ring proved to be completely incompatible with the pins used to assemble the construction and the soft box sliding off the speed ring. A disaster waiting to happen.
Almost all manufacturing nowadays is done in China. The major difference being Western companies employing rigorous (debatable, yet compared to native Chinese it is indisputable fact) quality controls. Some people still claim that China will become world leader in manufacturing and they refer to post-WWII Japan’s technological advent.
Wrong. Just like Japan, China did, does and will copy a lot of products and concepts, but the key difference still remains: while Japanese industries re-worked, improved and strengthened the design learning from mistakes, Chinese counterparts keep churning out same cheap, useless junk since 1950s.
So, important lesson learned indeed. If you buy cheap – you pay twice. And when it comes to studio equipment I will stick to non-Chinese manufactured items. And I urge you to do the same. Perhaps not as overpriced as high street shops, but stick to well known manufacturers such as in case of soft boxes – Elinchrom and Westcott.
Happy Shooting
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