Just a few posts ago I wrote about a very simple E27 slave flash.

I’ve just made a few test shots with it. Here are the best ones (you can guess how the rest looked ).

The flash bulb was on a tripod and fired through an umbrella as I purchased the whole set together. It was roughly 2 meters from my model (who was, by the way, me ) at full power, since this flash light cannot be adjusted at all. I triggered it by my camera’s built in flash which was set to manual mode and down at 1/128 power providing almost nothing but a barely visible fill light effect. The camera was at 4m from the model with these (manual) settings: ISO 100, shutter speed 1/200 sec and aperture of F8. To be completely precise there was some ambient available light as well, but relatively little. Towards the right hand side of the picture there was an almost white wall at about 2 meters that might have given some reflected light on the model’s back and shoulder.

I know that the aperture could have been opened up a bit letting in more light and the shutter could have been dragged down (McNally speak here) to, let say 1/30 to give more visibility to the background.

Verdict: not ideal flash for portraiture with the built-in pains of being relatively weak and not adjustable, but for such a bargain price you could start experiencing the magic of off camera lighting. I think it was not only purely marketing when the retailer mentioned that even pros had bought it to use it as a hair light.