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don't bother reinventing the wheel,
look for some lumedyne lights .. they are not expensive used
and are already battery powered.
the one i have has 2 heads and a 10 year pro rated battery.
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 Originally Posted by tkamiya
Be careful with inexpensive inverters.... Those does not necessary generate clean power, and it *can* put enough stress on cheaply designed flash to blow is circuit. They are often not built with enough margin for safety. (ie. protection towards not so clean power input)
On the other hand...
Two winters ago I was immersed in a particularly difficult software engineering certification course. During a bad pair of snowstorms the power failed for two plus days. My assignments were due online - no excuses. So I connected a simple 300-watt Coleman camping inverter to my idling Ford pick-up truck outside on the driveway. This provided sufficient power to connect my desktop PC and home network for me to finish and submit by the deadline, a process lasting eight or ten hours.
This inverter produces a simple modified square wave rough enough that connecting it to an induction device such as an electric motor will generate an audible hum. Yet the "delicate" IC componets making up my computer/network hardware were more than robust enough to survive the less than pristine approximation of a sine wave produced by this not so clean power input.
As a matter of fact, I'm typing on that very PC system right now, and will post this message over the very same home network equipment. So I suppose YMMV - significantly for some of us.
Ken
"In 1850 it would have been unusual to find someone who had handled a camera or looked at a photograph, but 100 years later the reverse would have been true—the camera had become a ubiquitous device, its techniques manageable by even the clumsiest and least sophisticated person."
– Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, 1984
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Ken,
Not all inverters generate modified square waves. Some generate square waves with pretty high transient on rising edge. Most PC power supplies (actually all that I've seen) has a filter circuit, then full bridge rectifier circuit, then to pretty big filter capacitor before it goes to switching circuit. That - pretty much filters out any transients if there are any - unless they are huge. I didn't want to get into all that before I knew what OP owned or is going to buy.... Yeah, YMMV big time....
Anyway, I wanted to point that out to the benefit of OP....
Develop, stop, fix.... wait.... where's my film?
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On the second thought....
How about just using portable hot-shoe type flash and couple that with simple triggers that will react to any incoming flash light from the camera? You might end up with much cheaper and simpler solution....
Develop, stop, fix.... wait.... where's my film?
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Originally Posted by tkamiya
On the second thought....
How about just using portable hot-shoe type flash and couple that with simple triggers that will react to any incoming flash light from the camera? You might end up with much cheaper and simpler solution....
i thought about that but sense im a canon person, flashes and flash accessories run very very pricey, also i really hate the fill from the camera... so
What is one to do as one watches humanity slowly destroy itself?
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No.... I'm not suggesting you go buy Canon stuff. If you are using mono-light type flash, you are doing things entirely manually, right? You can buy (for example) an old Metz handle mount flash, Vivitar shoe mount flash, etc, for 50 dollars or less at KEH. Sometimes, old Vivitars are like 20 something dollars each.
Now, you do NOT necessary want to plug them DIRECTLY into your Canon as most of them aren't compatible, and many use too high of trigger voltage that will damage your Canon. (by the way, there are certain older Metz handle mount flash that ARE safe, too - and I use it with my Nikon)
HOWEVER... They can be combined with a remote optical slave trigger and used remotely. Your camera mounted flash, used in manual exposure mode (so pre-flash won't trigger it) will activate the slaves. Many of them can be adjusted to partial power, too.
At places like Adorama, I see optical slaves for 20 dollars or so.
Buying batteries, case, fuse, and inverters will probably cost you in excess of 100 bucks. You can buy two sets of these flash and remote for not much more than that.
Just something to consider. I like making stuff, too, but often, total cost will exceed other ready-made solutions. If you are interested in creating your own solution and tinkering, fine, but if you are going for least expensive, most practical, and useful, then you might think other solutions, too.
One tinker to another.... that's what I am suggesting...
Develop, stop, fix.... wait.... where's my film?
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don't you need a pure sine wave inverter?
i keep seeing square wave mentioned here and I always see warnings to use pure sine wave.
anyway a good portable battery solution and cheap don't really mix.
you could go vivitar 283's ganged and run off a homemade sla battery or a quantum turbo (more expensive)
or
a Norman 200B or 400B
or
Lumedyne
or
Dynalite Uni JR and Jackrabbit
or
AB and a Vagabond
then there are the pricy Elinchrom or Prophoto
almost everyone makes one but they aren't cheap
AB has a Liithium solution that looks attrative but is still on the drawing board.
If you want to keep your current mono's you will need to see if the inverter solution will handle the initial current draw at recycle of your monolights.
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On another option to monolights from an invertor is battery powered strobe. Consider sniffing around for old Norman 200B packs.
I found one for $15 made in about 78 on the weekend and fed it a new $20 2.3Ah gel cell 12volt battery last night in lieu of buying a whack of OEM nicads that would cost and have the lovingly forgotten memory effect.
Mine now merily spits out 200ws which with the LH-2 head in a 5" reflector gives me a gn of 160 at iso 100, and can be switched down to 100 and 50 w/s, and the thing can hang on my shoulder.
my real name, imagine that.
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I made one of these for my alien bees ab800 and get about 300 full power flashes.... Its lightweight and simple to do... Plus I can plug it into my car if I run out of batteries
http://kemplemedia.com/blog/2009/01/...on-for-09-pt1/
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