Christmas is on December 18th for me this year

Altogether my Think Tank Security’s bag weight comes in at 35 pounds, which is a low enough for domestic and some international flights.  My biggest gripe with the Security was setting the bag locks.  I spent thirty minutes or more to finally get the rear lock’s combination switch to update.  In the bag picture on the bottom right you can also observe that the bag doesn’t seem to be hollowed out to form a flat wall as well.  I believe its because it needs room for the wheels or maybe I just need to air the bag out some.

Getting down to brass tacks, here’s the highlights:

Canon 40d

My three favorite lenses:  17-55is, 70-300is and a 100 or 50 prime depending on my shoot.

4 mixed Pocket Wizards and a PW mini

Lots of batteries in a small Lowepro AW20

2  ‘Justin’ clamps

Small 22inch Westcott umbrella

Alienbee B800 monolight

Complete Speedlight Pro flash mod kit

Canon 430exII and 2 540ez

Flexible minipod, 2 lens hoods and an air blower

So what does one do with ten dollars? Well they go golfing.  I was tired of lugging multiple stands, tripods and umbrellas for each shoot.  It is much simpler for me just to haul one massive bag and break my back in several places. I look a little silly showing up at a shoot with a giant golf bag to say the least but I’d rather keep the $300 versus buying the top Tuffpak unit for airline travel.

Idea blantanly stolen from a Strobist thread.  A good medium is apparently the golf travel bags. These bags are intended for placing your usual golf bag inside of when loading on an airplane and have more beef to them to help protect stands inside. They can be found for around $20-60 on ebay.

So I dremeled out the middle T brace of my bag and left the smaller divider in.  I had one large section for stands and one divider in for a smaller section to keep umbrellas in.  The storage on this bag is overwhelming when I consider how many extra random trinkets I can place in the side sections.

Build: The 285HV feels like a relic out of the cold war. This is good in a way since the knobs and especially the zoom head are easy to identify and change. The DF400 feels pretty plastickiy. I’ve actually already dropped the DF400 from two feet or so by accident and it seemed to fire sprodically whenever I pressed the trigger and it was in shutter or aperture mode and was mounted on-camera. Like a bad rash the behavior has seemed to vanish.

Unique to the 285HV: An external power plug to add the flash to a Lumedyne or Quantum battery is a big plus. The 285HV also has a Vivitar plug for hooking directly into a wireless unit. It never shuts off once its on. The hotshoe has a unique lever instead of a wheel to turn but works effortlessly. Negatively, the 285HV also features the calculus exposure wheel – I used to think I was smart until trying to decipher the numbers on it.

Unique to the DF400: A fancy pants lcd display plus E-TTL or i-TTL support. The DF400 also features a optical slave, while flaky at over 15 feet and depending on line of sight to its front red sensor, which was pretty reliable under 10 feet. Unfortunately you can’t have the slave operating and recieve a signal to fire the flash from the shoe at the same time. So there is no optical and radio redundancy for this unit.

The flash will also shut down if not used for 3 minutes and you can’t wake it up with a remote trigger. A useful ‘OFF’ is printed on the display when it turns off to taunt you. If you keep the optical slave on the DF400 never shuts off. I forgot about it in the living room and the flash was still ready to rock six hours later. The failsafe work-around for the unit powering down is to put the DF400 in the camera hotshoe and let the E-TTL signal wake the flash up (useless?) without turning it off then on. The DF400 shoe was designed for pterodactyl’s; it is a pain to turn and has notches in it.

Recharge to full: Around 5-6 seconds on both flashes with Eneloops.

Power: Tested at 10 feet at full power with an Alienbee B800 and both flashes at their widest settings against plain white muslin. The 285HV saw about 1.1 stops less power than the AB800 (a bit over 50% loss). The DF400 lost around .1 to .2 stops of power compared to the 285HV, only a marginal loss.

Analysis ?

I really wanted to like the 285HV, but the dumb gel holder just isn’t a compatible size with my other 540ez and 420ex flashes. If Vivitar just revamped the 285HV with an optical slave and smaller head I would have been pretty joyous.

The newer DF400 only looks like a survivor if I use it primarily as a optical slave with a built-in flash. Manual slave flashes with 5 power levels are fine by me. Canon really needs to release a flash with an optical slave option to catch up with Nikon. I suppose the DF400 is still an alright value buy at $100 if you don’t want to get a 580ex. I’m keeping mine for now.

Here’s another useful thread. It seems the DF400 is the same unit and is rebranded as several other names.  One more note; the test button on the DF400 is a real pain to push.  You really got to mash that button down to get a repeatable test fire.

Update: 1/3/2010

Sold my Vivitar and moved to 430 ex2′s.

So I have my new Vivitar’s today; one 285HV and a DF400MZ. The DF400MZ is apparently Vivitar’s newer model and includes E-TTL modes compatible with modern Canon and Nikon DSLR’s.

The 285HV represents a workhorse design that’s been the staple of many professional’s kits, while the DF400MZ went all electrical. I’ll have the lowdown on the ergonomics  tomorrow.  Bottom line is I’m keeping the DF400MZ and returning the 285HV.

My only unhappiness lately is my new gear. A personal hobby of mine is beating a dead horse, my Alienbee B800, easily the best entry level flash in the photo world, it just can’t take an umbrella and be gelled to my satisfaction at the same time. Granted the AB800 is great at killing sunlight at 6 to 8 feet. I’m looking at other monolights or perhaps the Dynalite system. I’ll let you guys know what I decide on.

New computer