The PRESSlite VerteX

I’m a huge fan of using off camera speedlights for on-location lighting, à la strobist style. Throwing a little gelled light from a few 580exII’s or SB-800′s can give incredibly stunning results. Sometimes with small speedlights though, it’s tough to get the light to go exactly where you want it. That being said, there always seems to be a new whizbang or gizmo in town aimed to make your speedlights just a little easier to use.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve taken the bait on just about every one of them. Most are small and pretty inexpensive, so they’re an easy sell (others such as the P-dubs and Radiopoppers are not). A few that I’ve tried include the speedstraps, gels, snoots, speed grids, bounce card & gobo system from Honlphoto, Pocketwizards, flat foam and rubber bands, note cards, Radiopoppers (can’t wait for mine to arrive), Canon’s ST-E2 transmitter, Gary Fong’s Lightspheres, Lumiquest Bounces, and of course, my favorite – the Sto-fen omni bounce. The list could go on and on, but of all the crap I’ve tried, my most consistent results come from a combination of using the Honlphoto gear and a Sto-fen diffuser. Trial and error at it’s best. Learning from my mistakes, as Joe McNally would say.

Getting to the point… today I came across yet ANOTHER flash diffusion tool – the PRESSlite VerteX. Looks like a pretty cool way to bounce your flash all over the place using two mirrors on a pivot – but I don’t know if I’ll bite. I’m pretty happy with the setup I’ve got going right now, and I might wait till some other folks try it out to see how it really performs. Looks like it might be fragile, even though they say it’s made of a hybrid-elastomer type of plastic. For a nicely illustrated idea of how the thing works check out their gallery section. Anywho, just thought I’d share in case anyone was interested in turning their speedlight into a small-scale replica of a satellite.