David Woof

From my own experience, when trying to get hold of the gear you want for a photographer’s lightweight Strobist kit, living in the UK doesn’t make things that easy. So, to help you on your way in getting the most out of your camera and strobes / flashes, here are some companies which can supply some of the essential components for your Strobist system:

• For the lightweight Manfrotto 001B Nano lighting stand, umbreIIa mount and hot-shoe adapter, all these are available as a kit (or separately if you so wish) from The Flash Centre. If you live in London, they have a store near Russell Square which is well worth a visit.
• For the collapsible Westcott umbreIIas, you have three choices (white shoot-through, silver reflective, or white with a black cover for use either way) available from Creative Video. The customer service I have had with these guys has been exceptional.
• For ball bungees and strobe filters (both colour correction and for effects in your photographs), I use FlashGels.
• For budget wireless triggers (Cactus V2s), go to Gadget-Infinity on eBay and search for “trigger”. Although shipped from the far east, postage charges are very reasonable, the shipment never seems to attract any VAT or duty at customs, and normally comes through in 4 to 5 working days. Once you get them, you can make some relatively simple changes to get the reliability of the transmission up to near enough 100%, and increase the range by an order of magnitude. You simply need to cut a small hole in the case, and fix a 44 Mhz stubby aerial, wired with shielded wire to the antenna point on the circuit board, and the shielding on the wire you’ve used fixed to the -ve of the battery terminal. Drop me a line if you’d like more details.

Once assembled, the above kit looks like the following (this is my kit, excluding the triggers) - a very portable package:

I have used all of these suppliers myself, and found their service to be excellent. Note that I don’t get anything myself from you choosing to purchase from these guys - my recommendation is simply based on the experience I had with them all. Additionally, most of the above (apart form the eBay triggers) are UK based, so no complications with import duty or VAT.

Another useful tool (or rather reference work), is the classic book “Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting“, which contains a ton of first principles information on lighting a whole range of different subjects. I can highly recommend this as a source of solid lighting theory to back up the Strobist approach.

Another location for the lighting stand is Teamwork Photo & Digital, although I haven’t tried these chaps myself yet, so I can’t vouch for their service. If anyone has experience with them, please drop me a line.

Finally, if you have found the above information useful, and it’s saved you some money on import duty and VAT, please feel free to make a donation through Paypal to me to keep this site alive by clicking on the button below - it will make me smile too