Photography Reviews

10 Advantages for Any Wildlife Photographer Who Shoots with an XT Flash Extender from Harbor Digital Design

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  1. It’s easy to understand why wildlife photographers, or aspiring wildlife photographers, gravitate immediately to lenses with enormous focal lengths, such as 600mm. Without a doubt, a lens of this size is critical to capturing great images of wildlife in their natural habitats. Experienced wildlife photo pros know, however, that fill flash is the most important technique for the best wildlife images. For a flash unit to provide fill light in a wildlife environment, it needs a piece of equipment that costs a fraction of a 600mm lens, and that is Harbor Digital Design’s XT Flash Extender Kit.

  1. For fill flash to add quality to your wildlife images, its light must be cast a much greater distance. The XT Flash Extender provides as many as 2 or more stops of light at 100 feet, based on your flash make and model. The key part of the XT Flash Extender Kit is its Fresnel lens, which focuses the light from the flash unit to cover that distance between you and your wildlife subjects.

  1. Harbor Digital Design makes a flash adapter for all flash models, so you don’t need some jerry-rigged assembly with rubber bands or Velcro™ to benefit from the XT Flash Extender. The adapter is included in the Extender Kit. The adapter slips on the flash head quickly and the Extender on the adapter just as fast.

  1. The XT Flash Extender could help you save thousands of dollars on a lens purchase because the Extender makes it possible to use a lens with a shorter focal length, 400mm compared to 600mm.

  1. For the wildlife photographer, fill flash is preferred to natural light for a number of reasons. Fill flash creates an image with less contrast. Exposure is selected for the highlights and the flash outputs just enough light (at lower power) to illuminate the deeper shadows, thus creating a more balanced image.

  1. The greatest benefit of fill flash in the wildlife setting is that it enhances image color, providing more saturation, so colors pop and appear truer, more natural.

  1. Often, an animal’s eyes are some of the most shadowy areas of a wildlife image. The XT Flash Extender from Harbor Digital Design helps to project fill light into recessed eye sockets to create a catch light that gives the animal’s face more depth and detail.

  1. It’s not just detail in the eyes or face of wildlife that fill flash and the XT Flash Extender emphasize. Without a flash, many wildlife images would simply be blurs, destining these photos to the trash. The flash of the fill light is so fast, however, that it will freeze the animal’s swift movement and reveal details, which are typically lost with just natural illumination.

  1. Fill flash also reveals the details in the dark fur or features of a creature. Natural light tends to capture these surfaces as flat and unattractive. Harbor Digital Design’s XT Flash Extender Kit throws that light across a greater distance, so the fill flash can do its job.

  1. Sports photographers covering outdoor or indoor sports will also recognize the advantages and value of the XT Flash Extender Kit as soon as they start shooting with it.

The Harbor Digital Design XT Flash Extender Kit includes a custom Flash Adapter, small Dome, Black Box, Fresnel lens (with a storage sleeve) and lens holder.

As a PhotographyTalk member or visitor, you qualify for an additional 15% off the current special offers for the XT Flash Extender Kit and ALL other Harbor Digital Design flash-enhancement products. This offer is valid through May 31, 2012. Please use the discount code, PT15, for these big savings. To order today, visit www.harbordigitaldesign.com.

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