The Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL is bound to be perfect for a wedding photographer.
Now before I go on, there’s pretty good reasons why the Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL will be great for wedding photographers and it really has to do with more or less enhancing ambient light and creating the light that isn’t there. Most photographers will opt for doing that with a hot shoe flash, but 500 watt seconds of power is more than enough to light up most wedding halls just by putting the Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL in a corner, pointing the head up to the ceiling, and firing off at ISO 400 and f5.6 at 1/125th. Crazy, huh?
Well, if you’ve known about the options that Profoto has had for awhile and those from GODOX and Flashpoint, then you’ve probably already known this too. But with Elinchrom you’re working with a big ass battery pack. This pack is part of what helps to create a package that lets photographers have HSS capabilities of up to 1/8000th on their camera’s shutter speeds. Beyond that, it can also give you a flash duration of up to 1/20,000 although the normal is more like 1/3400. The Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL can fire off 400 full power flashes; you know, just in case you actually need 500 watt seconds of power.
The Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL includes a flash head, battery, charger, snappy, reflector, and a location bag. Using the Elinchrom Transmitter PRO that communicates with the Skyports built into the Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL, photographers can use HSS to overpower the sun–which is highly underrated by many photographers out there. One of the nice things about the Elinchrom Transmitter PRO is that you get access to stuff like second curtain flash.
At the moment, we’re not sure what the Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL costs, but it seems like an obvious option for photographers who tend to like Elinchrom’s stuff. It’ll come in Canon and Nikon at first with other brands to come later on.
Elinchrom’s lights have always been really interesting. What they’re known for are configurations like this: Ranger style with heads and a battery pack that goes on the ground. They’ve always used the Skyport radios and have been toe to toe with Profoto in some ways. But the world of flash photography is becoming more and more confusing. I’d be shocked if folks could tell the difference between the output from these lights and those from both Profoto and any other brand on the market. And that’s the thing, you can’t really tell. So you’d opt for something like Elinchrom for better reliability and if you’re more of a person that prefers to have interchangeable heads with one pack. With Elinchrom’s system you simply just buy new heads or packs as you need them. Don’t need TTL? Then this probably isn’t for you.
But at the same time, the Chinese manufacturers and retailers like B&H and Adorama have their own house brands that do the job for many photographers out there. So I’d really like to see how the new Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL does over time.