With the beautiful weather today, Nicola called over to let me do some fun test shots with the Elinchrom Maxispot. It's a large, efficient reflector that allows me to overcome the Sun, to give a day for night look using my Elinchrom Ranger Quadras.After a quick test on the green, I noticed something rather unusual down by the train tracks: a burnt out car. We used this as a background before moving down to the tracks. My aim here wasn't producing portfolio images, but rather getting used to new equipment. It would be a sad and sorry state of affairs to be working and not be familiar with ones tools. As I've recently invested in new modifiers (some of which I've already posted about), testing is an absolute necessity.

Here the Maxispot is lighting both Nic and the car. Given that the Quadra is only 400 w/s and it's not at full power here, it's doing a fantastic job with coverage from about 8-10 feet away. The Sun is coming from camera left, behind Nic. You can see this acting as the hair light in this shot.

We moved onto the railway gates from there. Again the Sun is from the rear, this time the right. While reflectors are a hard light source, I think this has a softer transition, with reasonable fill in.

The final setup with this light was at the bikeshed. Being in shade I was able to drop both the aperture on the camera, and the power from the pack, almost to lowest power in fact.I did do one other test that day, but it wasn't Quadra based, it was with the 'O-Flash', a modifier in the Ray-Flash vein. It doesn't have a full circle, to allow ETTL to work. I test this, but to be honest, I prefer working it in Manual mode and working with a fixed distance. I have to say that, while ringflash is not a flattering light, I really missed the top shadow from this more than anything else.

I don't shoot this as an award winner, it's really just taken to examine the shadow pattern. The left and right shadows are immediately visible, but there's none on top, which is a little disappointing. But as this device is only €30, it's hard to complain. It's reasonable sturdy bar the clear plastic front, which is a little flimsy. I'd like to try this with 2 rear grids and see how it does.Considering we shot for only a little over an hour and got 4 locations (even though I've only shown 3 here), it was still a productive shoot from a test point of view. I've a much better understanding of these tools, and have utter confidence using them again in the future in a commercial situation.