We looked at the Lumedyne portable flashes about seven yeas ago when I worked for CSX, so I do not remember a lot of details about them.
We needed a fairly high-powered yet portable electronic flash unit (I'll call it a "strobe" just to save typing all those letters each time) for use under pretty tough conditions, such as fill-in flash outdoors in sunlight from 50-60 feet away as an example. The use of the strobe for nighttime outdoor photography in a rail yard or on board a ship at sea, etc., would have been nice, but was a very small part of what we did. The Lumedyne strobes were tremendously expensive for the few times that we would need such lighting, so we did not buy them. We opted instead for the less expensive Norman 400 portable strobe. You could vary the light output with 400, 200, 100 and 50 watt-second settings which were very handy for setting lighting ratios AND conserving the rechargable battery. If I remember correctly, with ISO 100 slide film on 400 watt-second setting, we would shoot at f/4 in large meeting halls from 40 feet away with the normal reflector. The Norman unit had a special parabolic reflector attachment that focused the light into a narrow-angle beam to achieve a greater light output than that obtained with the regular reflector. Don't quote me, but I believe that it upped the exposure by 2 f/stops, as I remember shooting at f/8 under the same conditions as above. It was hard to believe, but that's what our flash meters said, and the slides turned out right on the money. Keep in mind that the narrow-beam reflector covered a much smaller area than the normal reflector, such as photographing a person speaking at a lectern by shooting from the back of the room with a telephoto lens. Such a narrow beam would not be good for shooting trains in a railroad yard as the coverage would be too small and too spotty for such large subjects. The Norman lasted for about 40 shots on the 400 w.s. setting before its rechargable batteries died. I have one that I bought from CSX in 1993, but have not used it in over 3 years. My former coworker here in Baltimore bought CSX's other Norman 400 and has had nothing but trouble with the batteries ever since. Norman changed battery types or something, and he spent about eight months and many hundreds of dollars getting the new batteries to work in his old strobe. He said that in the long run it cost him more to replace the batteries than to purchase an entire new Norman 400 strobe head, battery and charging unit, but his expenditures were a little here and a little there until he was in too deep to back away. I really liked the Norman 400 for what I needed it to do for me. The best part was its lower price than the Lumedyne strobe. No matter what portable strobe lights might be on the market, I still prefer the quality and quantity of light achieved with a flashbulb in a large pan reflector for outdoor work at night where I cannot set up studio strobes. But not having to climb a ladder to replace burned-out flashbulbs after each exposure sure is nice! John B. Corns --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1277
