In our recent ring flash roundup, Wired.com photographer Jon Snyder took a combination of self-powered units and adapters through their paces. Soon after, the folks at Orbis got in touch, wondering why we had left their flash-adapter out. I told them to send one over.
The best part about a ring-flash adapter, like the Orbis or the Ray Flash that Jon reviewed, is that you just pop in your existing strobe and its light is reflected around a series of tubes to emerge in the trademark circle of flat light. This keeps down both cost and weight, and means that you can use your fancy, expensive speedlight on full auto, making great pictures easy to get.
It also means that the adapters are huge. Baseball-mitt huge. The Orbis isn’t going to fit in any normal sized camera bag. The reason is that the hollow tubes need to be a lot wider than an actual light-tube, otherwise they would just suck up the light and offer no more sparkle than a candle behind a dirty window. The Orbis, though, takes advantage of this bulk by keeping the neck – where the flash slides in – big too. My tests were all performed with a Nikon SB900, a (literal) giant amongst strobes, and while the fit was snug, it was certainly viable. For smaller units, there are some stick-on rubber pads in the box.
I slid in the flash, switched it on and… Damn, I didn’t have a cable. Because of the design, the flash unit can’t be mounted on the camera’s hot-shoe, so you’ll need a cable to fire it. This can be a very expensive cable that also sends all the automatic functions between the devices, or a cheap PC cord. I wanted auto, but I didn’t want to spend $60 on a wire. Surely I could use the built-in wireless functions of my flash and camera?
It turns out that I was in luck. The Nikon D700 talks to the SB900 through a series of quick, coded pre-flashes from its built-in speedlight. Even with the gun held up and to the side of the camera body, the flash fired fine, every single time.
The Orbis itself does suck out some light, but as ring flashes are used on-axis and pointed straight at the subject without using diffusors or reflectors, there was plenty of light left to do the job. I have used it on a few product shots over the last few weeks (the Surly bike wrench and the Brooks saddle, for instance) and I love it. Combined with the camera’s automatic mode it’s easy to dial the effect up and down, and once you get going, you learn to hold the unit and let it take the weight of the camera. It’s still bulky, and there is an optional bracket to clamp it to your camera, but you can get used to it.
And that’s really it. If you want to experiment with ring-flash, and you already have a strobe, this is a fairly cheap way to do it — $200 might not sound so cheap, but when you start pricing up the alternatives, you’ll see what we mean.
Will I buy one? I love the effect, and the Orbis is easy to use. But now I have the taste for it, I’d actually consider some of those more expensive dedicated units. They might not work on full-auto, but they will fit in my camera bag.
Orbis product page [Orbis]
Roundup: Ring Flashes [Gadget Lab]
See Also:
- Orbis Finally Adds Bracket to Ring Flash Adapter
- Lomo Ring Flash: Cheap and Fun
- Ray Flash Ring Flash Adapter
- Raid the Kitchen to Build a DIY Ring Flash
