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Our Profoto Industry Night!
My name's Oliver, and I'm Georges marketing manager, I was fortunate to host this incredible night with Profoto for our Industry Night showcasing all their new gear alongside cameras from Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon and Sony.
Profoto is the market leader in photography lighting, and with good reason, they have a huge versatile range of light shapers, and strobes. That are easy to set up, easy to use, and built tough.
We brought four seperate photographers to try out the new range of tools Profoto have released this year, here's what they used and examples of the shots they created!
It was great getting hands on had Ian van der Wolde with the new Profoto Soft Zoom Reflector which makes for quite a versatile tool. This large modifier is a few tools in one with its zoom rod allowing to change the beam angle, as well as the ability to switch from an indirect reflector into a large deep softbox. Ian had help from Canon using the new Canon EOS R5 II and their exception aperture F/ 1.2 primes include the RF 85mm F/1.2 and RF 50mm F/1.2 with our rep Rick Slowgrove and they were tethered into one of the brand new BenQ monitors to really show off how great their new addition is to the range!
Some sample shots with the Soft Light Zoom 120cm Reflector from Ian: 
I was hands on with the GFX 100S II with Fujifilm but I had more than a little help from Charlie Blevins whose in charge of training and events for Fujifilm and did a marvellous job making sure people got the most out of it. For me, it’s incredible coming from a medium format background, with its very slow and mostly manual focusing, it's so good having a fast accurate AF system with such a large sensor. I know I am a big fan of the GF 32-64mm but many people who got hands on, really loved the GF 45-100mm and the super compact Fuji 63mm. We were tethered as well on an Inovativ cart with a BenQ monitor to show off the images, which made a great work solution.
This one light set up we had in the studio space was using the new Pro-D3 1250 ws and I used a Silver Beauty Dish to really push this light, we were really stress testing it as the size of the modifier we had in front of it, was quite large, and it needed quite a bit of power! The Pro-D3 didn’t miss a beat, and is built for heavy usage:
I had a lot of questions on what that gigantic grid was, that is a collaboration between DoP Choice and Manfrotto and you can check it out here. I’ve created a quick collection of all of the grip gear here, including vesa mounts, laptop stands, c-stands and flags you can see in the link here.
These were the results with that set up:
We had Seiya Taguchi with his Nikon Z9 and a variety of lenses, from what he said, the new Z mount Nikkor 135mm Plena was a great choice for the sort of shots he was getting for that beautiful three light set up, but I also have to mention the versatility for these photos of the 24-70mm 2.8 Z. Seiya was helped. by our Nikon rep Brett who was on hand.
As Seiya had quite a number of tools in rotation, I’ve created a collection for his set up, so you can see everything he had in his arsenal with this link here.
A sample of what you can do with a versatile three light set up like Seiya set up, and if you love the result like we do, you can find the link to his workshop here:
Not to be forgotten, as many people had a lot of fun, we had the Sony set up with Clyde Vaughan with our Sony rep Nick Fraser. Still life often feels like a really static thing to set up, and I knew our friends at Sony could make this feel like a lot of fun. I personally love shooting still life, but it can feel like it’s a little tedious at times. I know it definitely didn’t feel that way, and I think a lot of that was due to our backlight which was the Fresnel Small mounted into a Pro-D3, we were taking advantage of the incredibly short flash duration with the Pro-D3 and the global shutter in the Sony A9 III to get those epic splash effects. Milk and berries were a great lot of fun, and many people asked about the mini smoke machine, which can be found in the link here. Clyde chose the G-Master 24-70mm II for most of these shots, which is an excellent choice in the Sony range.
There were quite a few OCF II flash tools out, with the Grid kit, Barndoors, and Snoots on hand. I’ve put a list of those all here, again these are so easy to set up, and helped create the versatile set the Sony boys used.
Now, not to be forgotten were the beautiful monitors we were using to showcase the images we created, these were the full range of colour accurate photography monitors from BenQ from 24 inch to 32, they’ve got great options especially if you want to accurately print your work! All can be found through this link here, I love being able to mount these vertical for tethered set ups, and it was made incredibly easy with the Macs as with USB-C, we were able to power the laptops and connect the display in the one cable
Finally it’s always important to have the right cables on hand, we used USB-C cables in both 4.6m and 9.2m from Tether Tools. The new Lever Locks that are included in the kits are a great addition especially as they have an arca base which makes life easy to lock in your cable, and not damage your ports.
If you have any other questions, please reach out, thank you again, and I hope to see you again soon!
A big thank you to our talent team, they were:
Stylist Yuzhen Wang
Make-up Artist: Michal Horry
Models were:
Checka Castleden from Chic Management
Mia Jovanov from Primary Management
Pierce Jones from Kult Australia
If you have any further questions you can reach out to me here!
Oli