Elinchrom Ranger RX speed

Posted in kayaking, Photography, Photos, Uncategorized by steverogersphotography on June 10, 2009

Elinchrom are a Swiss based manufacturer producing high end studio flashes for the fashion and action sports market. They are very popular within the action sports market due to their rugged builds and super fast flash durations, combined with a short recycle time. There are lots of manufactuers producing high quality studio flashes (alien bees, profoto, hensel etc etc) , but Elinchrom seem to produce the product best suited to shooting outdoor action sports with.

In the past I have spent a lot of time and effort working with the strobist model of utilising small speedlight strobes to create outdoor lighting set ups. Most of my time was spent using METZ C45 and the Nikon SB800′s with the pocket wizard radio remote triggers. There are lots of advocates for using small flashes (joe Mcnally etc etc) but they tend to be more portrait based or sponsored by Nikon ( 20 odd speedlights in your bag ). Personally I found the small flashes needed to be extremely close to the subject to achieve any results and also the ambient light had to be very low in order to over power it. This can be an acceptable path to go down for sports such as skateboarding, certain MTB shots, but I found for sports that put the subject further away from you such as skiing, kayaking etc etc, the speedlights produced nothing but lots of failed shots and frustration…

So after spending countless hours planning amazing outdoor lighting scenarios only to be shutdown, by moisture problems, battery issues, lack of duration issues, I finally threw down the dollars on what seems to have become certainly in the ski industry the strobe of choice the Elinchrom Ranger RX speed.

So the last week has been the initial learning curve on using the elinchrom for kayaking and biking shots specifically. So far the elichrom has been fantastic , it is super reliable, it fires every time, recycles fast enough to pop two shots in a sequence and most importantly has a short enough duration to freeze motion in the water and the kayaker. The build quality of the Elichrom is also an important factor as it is fully sealed on both the pack and head, as you can imagine this is a deal breaker for use around water and snow.