The closely anticipated Paul C. Buff Celestial Gentle has given photographers who shoot on location and on the transfer a compact, dependable, and inexpensive lighting answer for his or her work.
Most photographers who’ve been within the business for some time are accustomed to the Paul C. Buff line of lights. For years, they’ve been a staple for budget-friendly freshmen and professionals alike with the Alien Bee and Einstein techniques being discovered within the gear closet of virtually any artistic you meet.
Whereas the corporate has made moveable energy packs (Vagabond Mini), and even the Hyperlink with optionally available battery utilization to assist customers take their kits on the street, it wasn’t till the launch of the Celestial that the model provided one thing absolutely battery-powered that’s actually aggressive in each the ability, portability, and worth.
What Does The Celestial Carry To The Desk?
Paul C. Buff has been steadily including to its mild choices with Digi-Bee and optionally-battery-powered Hyperlink techniques, however now with the 500-watt second Celestial strobe the corporate has added its first absolutely battery-powered mild that may put out extra mild than a Godox AD600Pro whereas coming in about two kilos lighter than each the aforementioned AD600Pro and the Elinchrom FIVE. This will not sound like a lot, however while you begin including a number of lights to your kits, each single ounce saved could make an enormous distinction.
The Celestial is an extremely numerous entry to the Paul C. Buff lineup at present out there for creatives searching for highly effective instruments with a really consumer-friendly price range. The sunshine can be utilized on location with about 200 full energy flashes (this amount will range with modeling lamp use), out there from a totally charged battery, (further batteries can be found for simply $119.95) or within the studio on the identical battery energy and even plugged in to cost whereas in use. The moveable mild additionally provides 12-stops of energy variability giving customers an excessive quantity of flexibility when adjusting their settings to mix properly with the ambient and low-lit conditions.
Whereas Buff lists the Celestial’s full energy recycle at 1.5 seconds for the sake of consistency, in my testing it proved to be a lot sooner on a full battery and might even hit round 0.8 seconds. Whatever the location the sunshine is getting used, the Celestial provides customers entry to high-speed sync, TTL, motion, or colour mode that provides unbelievable colour consistency between photographs. What’s much more fascinating is the motion mode out there on the Celestial which supplies customers the flexibility to compress the flash right into a shorter length, making it simpler to cease/freeze movement with out experiencing movement blurs that may occur when capturing motion utilizing strobes.
The Celestial can be considerably extra inexpensive than a lot of its rivals, making it a super answer for photographers who’re continuously on the transfer. Particularly for those who want a number of lights in your setups. Creatives can rise up to 4 Celestial lights for about the price of a single Profoto B10X Plus, releasing up their wallets to seize far more dynamic lighting eventualities.
Along with all of the above options, Paul C. Buff provides its clients a degree of help that many different producers can solely dream of, even going as far as inviting locals to fairly actually pop by and go to their showroom and see them in individual.
The Paul C. Buff Celestial: Compact & Sturdy
The Celestial could really feel prefer it has a well-recognized physique design to a number of the different lights in its household when it from the entrance. As you’ll discover, the brand new system makes use of an LED modeling lamp system to maintain it from getting too scorching whereas in use (do you have to depart the modeling lights on), and to make it simpler to get artistic by including or eradicating the magnetic artistic colour management gels and diffusion domes.
One thing else noticeable on this mild is the addition of a big deal with positioned on the again aspect of the system. This grip/deal with will make it a lot simpler for customers to make exact changes to their mild positioning. Customers can also discover that the celestial nonetheless helps each one of many triggers beforehand utilized by Paul C. Buff (together with some Pocket Wizards) and likewise has the sensor alongside the highest to function as a slave unit with none points.
Each side of the sunshine have a latch for fast launch of the velocity ring for mild modifier attachments like softboxes and optical snoots, and customers can even discover an LED display with a big dial with a number of buttons for system setting modifications, navigation, and energy management.
Whereas customers can management and modify the whole lot they’d want from this interface, making the most of the brand new HUB and Buff Cellular App for iPhone and Android units will give them a lot sooner, simpler, and albeit, extra artistic management over the system.
Artistic Colours Made Straightforward
Paul C. Buff has taken the short gel software recreation a step additional with its magnetic colour gel dome system. The Gel Domes, designed to work on each the Hyperlink and Celestial lights, give creatives the flexibility to in a short time and simply add a contact of colour (and even colour correction) to their lighting setups. In solely seconds, customers can shortly add or swap out the rubber colour gel domes because of the tiny magnetic pins that snap proper onto the face plates of the Hyperlink and Celestial lights. They’re designed in such a method that they can be utilized with any Paul C Buff reflector, softbox, PLM umbrella, stripbox, magnificence dish, or octabox with out being in the best way or obstructed by the modifier.
The $64.95 Shade Gel Dome equipment comes with a one-year guarantee and eight gels together with Yellow, Orange, Magenta, Blue, Teal, Inexperienced, Purple, and Pink. The $24.95 Shade Correcting Gel Domes include the identical one-year guarantee and features a Full CTO gel in addition to a Full Plus Inexperienced gel.
The Buff HUB And Cellular App Brings It All Collectively
There isn’t any scarcity of triggers out there to work with Paul C. Buff lighting options, nevertheless, the HUB offers customers one thing just a little completely different that enables for just a little extra artistic freedom. The hub incorporates a hot-shoe mount on prime of the distant that provides customers the flexibility to attach their velocity lights for use in tandem with the Celestial mild system, additionally giving full TTL high-speed sync performance.
The Hub itself offers customers entry to some restricted settings it may well change together with enabling/disabling of Bluetooth for Smartphone connectivity, Heart Pin Triggering, the display brightness of the hub (decrease to avoid wasting battery life), enabling TTL or Handbook flash modes, and setting the frequency and channel for the Hub from 1 to 16 respectively. Why so many of every? It could be a tad little bit of overkill, however by the Paul C. Buff Celestial system, you might theoretically have 16 photographers, every with as much as 16 lights, all capturing concurrently with HUB’s and apps with out interfering with some other photographers setup.
Presently, the HUB system natively helps Canon and Nikon, with Sony and Fujifilm help anticipated to reach this coming fall 2023.
To entry the complete vary of settings and particulars out there by the Celestial mild, you’ll have to benefit from the Buff cellular app (Out there on Android and iPhone units) the place customers can entry each single element of the sunshine starting from the settings and depth of the modeling lamp, shoot modes (Motion/TTL/HSS), enabling/disabling the slave cell, organising mild configurations, and even accessing the complete library of help movies and product particulars by the Paul C. Buff web site direct hyperlinks constructed into the app.
Diving into the “Setups” just a little additional, utilizing this mode throughout the Buff app, creatives can label and pre-program their mild setups for quick and simple modifications. As an illustration, as a headshot photographer, when you’ve positioned your lights and received the fitting energy ranges for each, by the Setups part of the app it can save you the lights energy settings in order that the subsequent time you utilize them you’ll be able to simply simply re-load that setup and be able to go immediately. Mainly, you probably have a set of lights, you’ll be able to have them clearly labeled bodily and throughout the app so you’ll be able to simply load pre-set ranges for every mild primarily based in your goto seems to be, making it an extremely steam-lined workflow, saving you a ton of time on set.
Why Is This A Huge Deal?
As talked about above, the Celestial system from Paul C. Buff provides customers a totally moveable and extremely highly effective 500W mild system at a considerably decrease price and decrease weight than its competitors. For concerning the worth of a single Profoto B10x Plus, Paul C. Buff customers can get 4 battery-powered lights to create some unbelievable and complicated photos. Throw within the added bonus of an extremely quick colour correction and inventive colour gel system and also you’ve received your self one thing extremely particular for freshmen and dealing professionals alike.
For photographers who like so as to add artistic colours to their work, the brand new magnetic colour domes from Paul C. Buff simply make issues extremely quick and simple to cope with each on set, and particularly on location. Utilizing conventional gel sheets with gaff tape or adapters which get in the best way of further modifiers can get very very messy and even frustratingly sluggish generally to cope with, particularly when the opposite lights get too scorching and makes the tape fall off, and even worse, melts the gels instantly.
Not solely would this damage the tempo of your shoot, it might even carry it to a crashing halt for those who occur to really destroy the colour gels you wanted to get the fitting look and vibe of the mission. Plus you’d be left with a ton of sticky residue over your whole modifiers and light-weight.
Leveraging the magnetic gel system will enable customers to shortly change the colours on the lights in addition to altering or adjusting the modifiers with out having to fully untape and retape up the gels to a brand new setup.
Throughout our utilization of those lights, we had been in a position to swap out the colours (and modifiers) in just some seconds as we didn’t must wrestle with bodily mild domes that another mild manufacturers have.
Under are a number of different images I shot utilizing the Celestial:
The place Can You Discover Them?
The $649 Celestial Gentle and Equipment can be found now from the official Paul C. Buff retailer in addition to Amazon, Pixel Connection shops, and different third-party retail areas coming quickly. The Gentle features a magnetic diffusion dome, the delivery cowl, the battery, charger, and flash tube/mild itself. Along with every unit coming with a 2-year manufacturing facility guarantee and a 30-day Absolute Satisfaction Assure, the corporate says that because of the rising success of the Celestial and substantial buyer suggestions, it is going to present free delivery on orders of $200 or extra.
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