What Chuck Does

Ray Flash the Ringflash

This time in Taiwan, I met a man who was in the business of photo studio equipment, it’s also the same guy from whom I rented the studio for the photoshoot. Anyway, he had a Ray Flash in stock for the Nikon SB-800. I have always been curious about the Ray Flash so he allowed me to try it out during the photoshoot. Truthfully, however I have yet to find a use for the Ray Flash.

A ringflash provides on-axis lighting. The ring goes around the lens so from the camera’s perspective, the lighting hits the subject straight on. This is irreproducible with any other flash because of the angle of the light. Actually the closest you can come to reproducing the effects of the ringflash is to put the source of light behind the camera. However in doing so, you will inevitably block some of the light. Furthermore unless the source of light is a large ring, you won’t be able to create the ring effect of the directional ringflash.

Here’s an example:

But when would you need shadowless light? A lot of glamour shots take advantage of shadowless light. With that said however, glamour lighting is typically more than just a ringflash. The photographer sometimes floods the model with frontal light. In this portrait below, we used 2 umbrellas (one on each side of the camera) along with the Rayflash ringflash to really hit our model with a lot of light. Actually we used another 4 lights, 1 background, 1 hairlight, and 2 kicker/rim lights. This lighting setup was an exact copy of Jill Greenberg’s lighting schematic:

This allows us to create a very well-lit yet frontally exposed glamour shot. With some retouching we wound up with the following image:

As an aside, I think Jill (Greenberg) uses the ringflash along with the silver umbrellas to create specular highlights in the model’s face in order to later retouch and exaggerate/exploit those highlights.

Anyway, I know this is supposed to be a post on the Rayflash but without explaining what a ringflash does (and how to use it) it’s hard to evaluate it. The good thing about the Ray Flash is the supposed 1 stop light loss. While I can’t attest to the validity of this statement, I can tell you it’s pretty bright at full power. With the 2 umbrellas set to fill-lighting and the Rayflash set to full power, we were shooting at f/10 or f/11. That’s a pretty standard studio aperture. Personally, however I don’t mind shooting at f/7.1 which meant we could have powered down the Ray Flash (the SB-800) to save power.

So onto the details. The fitment on the Ray Flash is good but there is some play oddly causing the Ray Flash to angle downwards. I suppose this is the result of the weight of the Ray Flash on the SB-800 flash head. With the 24-70mm attached, the Ray Flash also does not allow for the lens to be exactly centered. That said, I don’t think it makes any difference in the results. The flash is bright. Almost blinding if your subject is looking into the camera. That’s one of the side effects of using a ringflash and it’s not particular to the Ray Flash. Furthermore ringflash results tend to generate some red eye however in my experience with the Ray Flash it has not occurred.

Overall I feel good about the Ray Flash. It’s well built and very portable and will afford plenty of future opportunities for me to create shadowless images.