Over the years, I have tried many strobe configurations and from this developed a few opinions about what I feel works best.

Large strobes or small strobes, which works best? I prefer a medium to small strobe over a large high output strobe. My experience has been that when shooting macro and/or close-up a small strobe provides all the light necessary at close focus distances. When shooting wide angle, my goal is normally to make the best possible use of the available ambient light and use the strobe only to bring out color, detail and to light shadows.

Large strobes pack to much light into a tight central beam area with an abrupt fall off at the beam edge. With macro this does not cause a problem although often much of a large strobes output falls outside the picture area, doing nothing but burn battery power. For wide angle it would seem that bigger must be better, but again from my experience this is not the case. To take the best advantage of ambient light, I am often faced with exposures of say f2.8 to f5.6 or f8 at 125sec. When your combine a nearly wide open aperture with the output from a big gun strobe, guess what, you are constantly fighting overexposure. Sure you can add a diffuser to knock down a and spread out the beam and move the strobe back farther to further defuse the light. Or you could simply go with a

A bonus tip for those who use a housed or RS system: You can never check the position of your strobes often enough! While you've been looking through your finder moving, focusing, composing the perfect shot. Murphy has been rearranging your strobes to point at any angle but the right one.

Do you need one or two strobes? That's a great question for next month.

Your questions and comments are welcomed.

Randy Morse
Email: RMorse@rickeng.com