MODIFIERS GEAR.
“Something really simple like a softbox will pretty much fit on anything, but if you get into anything more complicated, it may not”
I nterchangeable modifiers aren’t an entirely new idea. Mechanical adaptors have allowed lens tubes from ETC’s famous Source Four profiles to be used on other lights, and Bowens and Profoto mounts have long been common on stills strobes. Adoption of stills accessory mounts and general layout for film and TV has been, as Prolycht’s Mitch Gross puts it, ‘mostly a matter of chance’. “Bowens mounts come from the stills world. There’s no reason the Profoto mount couldn’t have been the one. But the body shape… when you think of the physical nature of a chip-on- board LED array, since you need a heat sink behind, it sort of naturally takes the shape of a strobe. So, why not use that kind of mount?” One potential answer to that rhetorical question is the standard Bowens mount is not actually very well standardised. “Something really simple like a softbox will pretty much fit on anything, but if you get into anything more complicated, it may not,” Gross warns. “A beauty dish is not particularly complicated, but it needs to have the centre relatively close to where the emitter is. That may also mean, say, Prolycht’s fresnel for the Orion 675 FS doesn’t fit another company’s light and theirs don’t fit on Prolycht’s lights.” That incompatibility, Gross emphasises, was not created deliberately. “When we designed our fresnel it came from very
zoom option and a device Gross refers to as a “parallel beam intensifier – a prime, rather than a zoom. When designing the 675, we knew they’d be heavy. For serious optics, there’s a lot of glass and a metal housing needing precision.” Flexibility of interchangeable modifiers is something Ossie Jung, director at Prolight Direct, has found popular among customers. “Having a light that’ll do more than one job is massively
specific technical reasons about cooling, so we can have a heat sink that surrounds it. It’s very different to the way other companies choose to build their lights.” Mechanical robustness is another concern as lights grow in power. “On the 300 FS we have a pretty standard Bowens mount but when we moved up to the 675, we knew what we wanted to do with our fresnel. It had to have a certain amount of beef and strength. It’s still a Bowens mount, but instead of rotating [the accessory], you put it in the slots and rotate the clamp. If your lens is leaning a little bit in the mount, it’s not in proper alignment, and that may mean it’s a bit dimmer in one part or has colour fringing or other optical issues.” Prolycht has worked with Dedolight to produce a range of lenses, including a wide-angle adaptor for the Orion 300 FS, a projection attachment with five interchangeable focal lengths, a
STANDARD ISSUE Not all modifiers are perfectly interchangeable – more complex designs require more forethought
59. MAY 2023
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