Who Is This For?

Existential Dread Edition

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Strobe Lights as a Microcosm of the Commercial Photography Industry

Or why I’m feeling especially out of touch at the moment

Here comes my idea of equipment-centric photography writing. Forget reviews and technical specs. What I want to talk about is existential dread brought on by new products. 

Strobemaker Broncolor announced a new studio strobe last week. It’s the Satos, a pack-and-head system with built-in batteries so it can also go conveniently on location too. Frankly it looks pretty impressive, and Broncolor always makes great stuff. My favorite strobe kit ever is their Move 1200L kit. Its only problem was that it retailed for more than $6,000 (for a pack, a battery and two heads) when it debuted a decade ago. 

Keeping up with inflation (plus a little extra for record corporate profit) means the new Satos pack, which comes in 1600ws and 3200ws varieties, should be in the neighborhood of $20,000.

Haha, wouldn’t that be ridiculous. 

But seriously that’s what it costs. The Satos 3200 pack retails for €18,895, which at today’s exchange rate is $20,309. 

Too rich for you? Try the smaller, less powerful Satos 1600, which you can get for just €14,695 (or $15,794.) You can’t afford not to own it!

Don’t forget, though, that’s just the cost for the pack. If you’d like to attach a light to it, that’s another $3,000. 

Oh, and if you’d like to plug it into a wall, that add-on is about $950. (Not a typo.) Adding a battery ups it another $1,000. 

All in all, that means this 1600ws studio strobe pack, should you outfit it with just an AC adapter and one light—going the most affordable way you can—will set you back $19,744. Step up to the 3200ws pack, 2 heads and a battery and you’re at $28,259. That is for a pack, two heads, a power cord, and a battery that’s good for about 150 flashes per charge. 

I’ll take two, amiright?

Okay, at the risk of going full boomer and “in my day, photographers could afford their own equipment…” I have one question: 

Who is this for?

No studio photographer I know is using just one pack and two heads, so if you honestly wanted to go barebones and set up a studio to have a backup and, say, three heads, you’re at 45 grand. Plus additional $1,000 batteries, light modifiers and the like. 

I reiterate: who the hell is this for?

To be clear, I am not questioning the quality of this gear, its performance, its color consistency, and the no doubt bleeding edge of technology. I know it’s fantastic. It’s the Rolls Royce of photographic lighting. What I don’t understand is how any photographer is supposed to afford a Rolls Royce? Especially when I think back to a time in the not-too-distant past when Broncolor was more like the Lexus, or maybe the BMW. 

This is the crux of my issue. It’s not how expensive this new system is. It’s how much more expensive it is than Broncolor systems have typically been. They’ve gone from expensive to completely out of reach. At least that’s how it feels to me. 

In a world where every working photographer I know talks about stagnating rates, I can’t understand who Broncolor believes to be the audience for this product. Look at Rob Haggart’s excellent “Photographers, What Do You Make?” series. Ninety percent of those photographers couldn’t afford this. Maybe even less.

Is it strictly for rental houses? Perhaps, but is that really enough of a market to justify manufacturing it?

Dear reader, I’m not about to pull the rug out from under you. I honestly don’t understand who this is for. Because I know some really successful photographers and I can’t imagine any of them dropping $25k on a basic two-light studio kit. 

They’re not the only ones, either. For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to figure out the purchase of new studio strobes, and I discovered that the only new pack-and-head options come from Broncolor and Profoto. The latter’s Pro-11 pack starts at $17,500 and just plugs into a wall, no battery option at all. At least the new Broncolor can go outside. 

I attribute this lack of options largely to the death of the studio and the rise of “authentic” photography that takes place out in the real world. Which I guess is why there’s no need for attainable studio pack systems any more.

Still, if you’re going to make one, why make it so damn expensive? 

I hate to just shrug and say “It’s simply not for me.” The studio photographer in me is sad and confused. Who is it for? I know so little, I don’t even know what I don’t know.

Maybe I’m looking at it wrong, and Broncolor and Profoto know that their products are prohibitively expensive, and that’s fine with them. Maybe the market for these studio pack-and-head systems is so small that they have to make them so expensive to be worth their time. In a world where the alternative is no packs at all, I guess a $20,000 pack is better than nothing. But not much. 

Or maybe it’s just the kind of thing that smart photographers who are also good businesspersons know they can spread across a few years at just a few hundred bucks per month. Put that way, I suppose it seems more attainable. But still, not much. Maybe the answer is simply that I’m not nearly as successful as I thought I was. 

If you can shed some light on this, please comment. Even if you’ve just got a theory, or a wild guess. I’m dying to know who has $50k to drop on an amazingly good but fairly minimal setup. I would love to understand this fundamental truth. Because at the moment, I’m feeling quite out of touch, and like the photo business increasingly has no place for me and the photographers I know. 

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The Broncolor of Cars

In other news, this 1989 Rolls Royce Silver Spur is available on eBay for the low, low Buy-It-Now price of $36,000. To put it in simpler terms, that’s just one Broncolor Satos pack, four Pulso heads, three batteries and an AC connection. Plus tax. I’m thinking of it as “The Broncolor of cars.” 

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TLDR: Seven Links

• Want to live and work in Hawaii next summer? Apply for the National Parks Association’s Volcanoes National Park Residency and spend June of 2024 getting paid to photograph in Hawaii.

• First it was reported that lensmaker Zeiss would be exiting the still photography market. But then a few days later the company said not so fast, we’re not dead yet. Methinks thou doth protest too much. They may not be done but they sure seem to be tiptoeing toward the door. Which is obviously sad to see any time a legacy brand disappears. But I think it’s even worse to consider what it means for photography in general. There’s this recurring theme of “it’s just not worth it anymore” coming from lens makers, magazine makers, strobe makers, et al. How worried should we be?

• Apple is shutting down its My Photo Stream service next month, which surely you know because, like me, you’ve also been getting an email each week from Apple about it. Make sure you download your iPhone snaps so that you have them on your phone or your computer. The real point of this PSA is not about My Photo Stream in particular, but rather a reminder that you should never ever trust a cloud service for anything important. They can shut it down any time it stops being profitable—or even profitable enough. Keep your photos on local drives too. Don’t suffer at the whims of Tim Apple. 

AI Corner

• What we think of as impressive, futuristic AI is really AGI—artificial general intelligence, the Star Trek style computer that can just solve our problems for us. And it’s not here yet. Current AI is, as I've said before, glorified autocomplete. This episode of the Recode podcast with Peter Kafka has a few great interviews that help put this central AI question into context: should we be worried or excited?

• There’s an AI camera. It’s pretty great. It uses location and weather data inputs to prompt an image generator to create a visual image. Input text such as “standing at the corner of Hollywood and Vine at sunset” and it will output an AI-generated image of, well, that. 

• While in the U.S. stock photography agencies are suing AI developers who scan their libraries to train AI, Japan has determined it won't enforce copyright when AI developers use copyrighted material to teach their machines. It’s a move that is sure to help AI imagery progress, and it’s likely to draw the ire of human artists such as the photographers and painters upon whose work AI are trained. 

• Speaking of copyright, Italian copyright is downright un-American. A recent ruling went against publisher Conde Nast after it drew the ire of museum Gallerie dell’Accademia for publishing an image of Michelangelo’s David on the cover of GQ Italia without permission. The museum owns the rights to the 500-year-old sculpture, and Italian law protects images essential to Italian cultural identity—which David certainly is. So even though the statue’s image would typically be public domain, the courts ruled against the magazine publisher to the tune of $50,000.