Pelican Power

So recently I have received a lot of questions about my homemade vagabond (or battery pack), so I thought I would post how I made mine (its incredibly simple). Dont get me wrong the Paul C. Buff Vagabond II is a great little piece of equipment for the price and would recommend it but I had two motives for building my own:
1. I just like DIY projects
2. More power, faster refresh time

So Here is how I built mine.

Inverter
SAMLEX 600W Pure Sine Wave Inverter
peak power is 1000W weights in at 5.5lbs and I get a refresh rate of just under 2 seconds at full power with a White Lightning X1600 (Vagabond II is 2.5 seconds)
Price $199

Battery
Gruber 12V 18AH weights in at 13lbs
Price $33.34

Case
Pelican 1510 weights in at 13.6lbs
Cost $129.50 (I paid $159 because I bought at frys. foamerica.com has the best prices on pelican cases though)

The build is simple its just and inverter and battery (if you know how to hook up jumper cables you can do this). You just need to make sure you get a pure sine wave inverter, this is the most important part because if its a modified sine wave it wont work and you'll fry your flashes.
Other then that its just a positive and negative wire connect from the battery to the inverter. Then you'll just need charger. I chose to built mine in a pelican case so that i can carry a couple of batteries as well as modifying it a little more. Right now the inverter and battery just sit inside the case but i am working on a plan to integrate everything into the case similar to a elektrona flash feeder. More on that to come.

Post Process | CII guestLINK

So I don't tend to do this much post process on an image but the client didn't have a black version of there product yet (? seriously) so I had some fun in post getting this some what boring product to look a bit more sexy and appealing... I mean who wouldn't want one of these in there hotel room...right. anyways here it is from Camera to Ad.



Original image taken from camera and processed in Lightroom then sent to Photoshop for editing.


Needed a bit more background for vertical ad space.


Of Course the product needs to be black not gray so Paint it Black... and a little bit of sharpening to enhance the edges.


Still not sexy enough..... add a reflection...


Next lets add a nice gradient to get light fall off and we are almost there.


Finally add a logo and some headline and body copy and you have yourself a guestLINK ad

Advertising at its best

This was far to good not to share.



"Brilliant move by a local BMW dealer in responding to a national Audi ad. Audi’s 2009 A4 ad on the left side of the street says “Your move, BMW.” Santa Monica BMW comes back with an M3 ad across the street that says “Checkmate.”"
Original post here: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1675-santa-monica-bmws-checkmate

Between B-sides

I thought I would share some of the edits that didn't make it into the between series on the website. These were some of my initial edits i made when I was trying to decide weather I wanted to do the series in b&w or color. In the end I opted for the color because I felt it expressed these places the way I see them. However I liked these selects far to much and wanted to share them.





To see the rest of the Between Series