Can I have a little moan?
A while back I switched from Bowens lighting gear to Elinchrom equipment. Bowens being clunky, heavy british made stuff. Elinchrom being reliable lightweight top quality Swiss made stuff. or so I thought. Basically the Bowens was heavy as hell and didn’t recycle between flashes that fast. But hey, it was cheap, hardly ever bust and spares were only one phone call away. The Elinchrom stuff though has been an entirely different experience one, and not the one I was expecting. Not only do the tube wear out in MONTHS, they’re fucking hard to get hold of. Could it be the UK importers are just crap and don’t hold enough stock of the single user replacable component in the heads? or maybe pixies steal them from their stockrooms and trade them for magic beans. Whatever the reason, thanks to the baggage handlers at Prague or Stansted I now need 4 new flash tubes and no one in the UK has any stock at all. I have only two working flash heads left. Normally I keep spares, but for some reason, I’ve just gone through a phase of killing tubes, so I was down to zero even before the baggage handlers flung them from the plane, probably before it had even stopped. I guess I’ll have to just order a bunch from the manufacturers direct or maybe the US.
