Chimera has long been a photo industry standard bearer. I’ve used just about every brand of light modifier and the Chimera products tend to be better designed and built than most. They tend to travel better and last longer too.
I recently tested the 5645 kit as a headshot booth but it has many potential uses.
My assistant Tom Shue helped set up the kit so that it essentially looks like the illustration. We used a strobe on a large beauty dish as the main light and another strobe pointing at the wall and bouncing back at the translucent background to get a pure white background behind the subject.
We brought in a model and I went to work. The booth is narrow at less than four feet, so in this configuration you have to shoot tight. I was working with a Canon 1DX and 70-200 f/2.8 MK II lens hand held. I used a remote trigger to fire the strobes. There were no other light modifiers. Nothing fancy. The idea was to provide a simple, relatively flat and flattering light that could easily be used in a situation where the photographer could just position each subject in the same place and knock out a series of good looking shots with a minimum of fuss.
Photo by Scott Bourne – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
The kit assembled into the headshot booth in about 10 minutes. We placed the silver side of the panel on the inside of the booth to add some specularity. It took us a couple of tries to get the lights just right but in less than 30 minutes from the time we arrived, set up the booth, placed and metered our lights, I got these two test shots. Not bad for a half hour’s work.
Photo by Scott Bourne – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
In addition to using this kit to make a head shot booth it can be used for everything from product setups to car shoots to family portraits. The entire kit sells for just under $1400 and includes the following:
• 4 #5060 42″x82″ frames
• 1 #5000 42″x42″ frame
• 6 #5090 sets Panel Frame Clips (sets of 3)
• 2 #5184 42″x82″ White/Black panel fabrics
• 1 #5144 42″x42″ White/Black panel fabric
• 2 #5184 42″x82″ White/Black panel fabrics
• 1 #5181 42″x82″ “Shoot Through” Chimera Cloth panel fabric
• 1 #5186 42″x82″ “Reflective” Silver/Black panel fabric
• 1 #5145 42″x42″ Reflective” Silver Gold Zebra / Soft White panel fabric
• 2 #3750 Grip Heads
• – 1 #3980 Duffle
If you need to set up a small shooting space in your living room or garage or at a tradeshow, etc., this is your ticket.
Highly recommended.
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