New Toy: Speedlight SB-900
Posted under: Long story short: I got a new SB-900 to supplement my on location fashion shoot. Read below for the full story.
One thing I learnt from my shoot with Katelin is that I enjoy on location shooting so much more. Furthermore, I need more flashes. My current pair of SB-600 and SB-800 have served me well, but they don’t recharge fast enough and two flashes are not enough for the various lighting methods for fashion photography. When I had the SB-800 and SB-600 strapped together to the Photech Softerlighter, the diffusion was eating away so much light that made shooting with speed simply impossible.
With 4 shoots coming up in February, I simply don’t want to be caught in such a situation again, so I dropped by Ritz Camera and fortunately they met B&H’s price and I’ve now got 3 flashes for my shoot tomorrow 
. I’ve been flipping through the SB-900 manual and practicing with some settings. Continue reading about first impressions.
It’s BIG!!!! I knew the SB-900 was big…but until you handle and compare it to the SB-600, it’s really hard to comprehend how much bigger this flash actually is. Well I’ve put together a few comparison pics between my three flashes just to give you a real idea about the size of the SB-900
L to R: sb-600, sb-800, sb-900
side to side..etc
it's simply silly…almost as if the dimensions are wrong.
If you are still not convinced…here is the diffuser size comparison between the SB-800 and SB-900
Other small things I’ve noticed so far. The lock switch for the shoe on the SB-900 is spring loaded so it smacks into place and stays there versus friction based system (seems that way) on the SB-600 and SB-800. The other thing is that the SB-900 pouch is divided into two compartments, one for the flash and one for the diffuser. This is a bit of a pain to be honest, as I tend to keep the diffuser on my flash and I put it in the pouch…so now SB-900 does not fit into the pouch with the diffuser on.
Anyways…first shoot with the SB-900 tomorrow. So fingers crossed. I’ve also bought a couple sets of Sanyo Eneloop rechargebles to see how well those perform. Enough for now…laters.
The SB900 looks to have gone back up to the size that the SB24/26′s were. And they aren’t small at all.
If you want this for fully manual, how come you didn’t save by going for an older manual flash? Want the flexibility of TTL and CLS?
well I don’t use TTL/CLS that much. But it’s a nice feature to have. I think I went for the sb900 mostly because of the faster recharge rate so I can use it as the main light and the 600/800 as fills. also…i’ve got a thing about buying used flashes…it’s like buying used lightbulbs…how much life is really left…hard to tell?
The pain for me is that it does not fit into my bag any more esp if i use the pouch. I use a Domke j series. also i still have those annoying pre flashes on my d200.