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We are Cape Town’s original one-stop rental studio and home to 12 magnificent shooting spaces but we also carry an extensive range of Profoto flash packs and light shapers as part of our  in-house rental equipment facility. We want to help you with your shoot and so every month we will highlight a different item in our photographic equipment arsenal .

photo by Ab Sesay

Ab Sesay is a commercial advertising photographer based in New York and he also works as Creative Director at Profoto US.  Every so often they ask him to shoot with a particular light shaping tool to demonstrate its strengths and benefits. This time it was the Magnum Reflector and the image above was the result.

“The assignment was simple,” says Ab. “Show what you can do with just a single Magnum. My response to that was to do a shoot where I’d try to imitate the effect of the late summer sun when it’s about two hours away from setting – low enough in the sky for the light to have some direction, but high enough to still be at full intensity.”

Ab explains why the Magnum is suitable for this purpose:

“Because the Magnum produces a hard and powerful yet homogenous light that is very even from the center to the edges. It has a large sweet spot with an even gradual falloff. In fact, when used together with the normal ProHeads or Acute/D4 Heads, the light it produces reminds me of what you would get from a Fresnel lens. The Magnum is also very efficient, it increases the output with an additional f-stop, and its deeper shape is great for reducing spill light in the studio.”

Ab was also asked if he had any tips and tricks on how to use it to its full potential?

“Like any other Light Shaping Tool, you should test it and get a feel for it. Sometimes we concentrate too much on technically knowing what the tools can do, when we should in fact just focus on developing a natural feel for them. For instance, like with any parabolic reflector, it’s not just the size of the light source that comes into play, but understanding how the light source can be focused and how that affects the quality and characteristics of the light. It doesn’t really matter how much you read about it. You have to try it out for yourself to get the hang of it.”

So why not take Ab’s advice and rent a Magnum Reflector from us and test I out for yourself or browse through our other lightshapers to find what you need for your next photo shoot.

See the rest of this post on the Profoto Blog.

RS

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