Old Honeywell Studio Strobonar Flashes April 16, 2008

I met a nice lady in Ottawa that lost her husband to cancer just this past December. He was a photographer like me. She was kind enough to give me a lot of his old photography equipment, including 4 old Honeywell Strobonar 202 Studio flashes with pop-up light sensors on top. I took a photo of one of them, using the two other ones for lighting…

You can see the pop-up photocell on the top, between the two white switches. This photocell detects when another flash has fired, and makes this flash fire almost simultaneously, allowing the use of multiple flashes at one time.

One of the white switches on top turns on the modeling light, which is a small 25 or 15 watt bulb in the middle of the actual flash tube. This modeling light can be used to preview the lighting effect on the subject that will be  produced when the flash goes off.

The other white switch turns on the main flash, either to a low or high setting. The high setting delivers an 80 watt-second flash, and the low setting a 40 watt-second flash. My regular studio power packs are 500 watt-seconds each, and each one of these can control four flash heads, so these old Honeywell Strobonar flashes are not that powerful, but they still come in handy, and are nice to have.

Here is a photo taken with two of the Honeywell flashes, with one set as the main (key) light on the left, and the other set as a fill light, which helps to fill in the shadows, just to the right of the camera:

It is a photo of a Vivitar 283 battery powered flash, with a photo sensor plugged into it, so that it also fires when the Honeywell flashes go off. The photo sensor is that little clear thing on the lower right of the photo. The shadows produced from the flashes are quite harsh, because I could not use any diffuser umbrellas or softboxes on the Honeywell flashes that would produce softer, more spread out shadows. Seems these old flashes do not  have any way to attach an umbrella to them, unless perhaps if I install some bracket to hold an umbrella somewhere, either to the side of the flash, or on a separate pole. I will have to figure out something. Here is another photo with the Vivitar Filter Holder taken off…

The filter in the filter holder at the moment is one that narrows down and magnifies the flash beam and is best used with a telephoto lens.

Here is a view of my quickly improvised studio in my garage. Once I get some things out of the way, I will be able to put in a bigger table, or even to roll out the background onto the floor.