A portrait of Squamish MMA fighter Jamey-Lyn Horth shot for the Squamish Chief newspaper. I shot this about a day after I first got the Godox AD-200. I decided I was going to see what it could do, so I set the power down to 1/16 sec and set the motor drive on my camera to 9 fps to get Jamey-Lyn at full peak action. This is about midway through a 10 shot burst and it’s still giving me the required power, which is really impressive. It also froze her in mid-air (and she was really moving), again, really impressive.

Introduction
For those not familiar with my work, I’m a professional photographer based in Whistler BC, Canada, but working extensively throughout the Vancouver and Squamish area. I started as a newspaper photographer at 16, and since 1991, I’ve been a full time professional photographer. I don’t have any other sources of income, my wife doesn’t have a high paying job, and I don’t have a trust fund or anything like that.

I had a Chinese made slave explode in my face during a wedding once, and since then I’ve been wary of brands like Godox. However, I have a few friends who swear by Godox products.

I picked up an AD-200, along with the X-Pro trigger, an S-mount flash clamp, high quality Bowens mount speedring for mounting softboxes (spend the money on a good one. I ordered a cheap version from eBay in the first week of December and as of January 22nd, it still hasn’t arrived), and a 7″ Bowens mount reflector. They make a smaller 5″ reflector that doesn’t need the Bowens mount, but I had a set of 7″ grid spots that fit the reflector. All of that came to $550 CAN, or about $250 CAN less than the Nikon SB-5000 flash by itself. The most common comparison is to Profoto lights, and they are exponentially more expensive. For example, the 7″ reflector that I ordered for the Godox was $12.99 CAN, while the Profoto equivalent is $379 CAN.

Now that I’ve been using the AD-200 for the last month, and it was a busy month, I thought I’d write down my thoughts on it.

A shot from Clair and John’s elopement wedding in December. They asked me to step out with them to get some photos while they called their grown children and told them they had just gotten married. I had the Godox AD-200 in a small softbox set down to low power to pick up the low winter twilight.

Description
The Godox AD-200 is kind of a unique product, although it liberally borrows from some design aspects of various super high end Profoto flash units. With the bulb head, it’s nearly a foot long and has a noticeable heft. It says you can put it in your pocket, but unless you wear baggy clown pants on a regular basis, that’s probably not going to work. It does fit nicely into most professional camera bags without any adaptation, which is pretty good. The unit comes with a bare bulb and fresnel head, but I’ve only used it with the bare bulb head so far. If I need a flash with a fresnel head, I have a bunch of Nikon flashes for that. The bare bulb was really the selling point for me. Bare bulbs are much better when mounted in modifiers like softboxes (which I use almost all the time), and it lets me use a larger 24″x32″ box, rather than just a small 12″x16″ box, which is about the largest you can really use with the Nikon. Godox has a new round head flash head that looks suspiciously like the head of a Profoto A1 head that should be a big improvement over the standard fresnel head.

Squamish bike racer Jack Burke beside Highway 99, photographed for the Squamish Chief. The top shot was with a 12″x16″ softbox, while the lower one was shot with the 7″ reflector. You can see the flash easily balances, even with high speed flash sync on, with the extremely bright sky.

Power
I’d say it’s about two to three stops more powerful than a Nikon SB-910, and up to 1/2 power, the recycle time is pretty much instantaneous. At full power, it’s really quick as well. If you’re going to try and balance it with full daylight, you need all the power the AD-200 has.

Reece family, from Tennessee, pose beside Fitzsimmons Creek in Whistler. For this shot, I had to balance the very bright light reflecting off the creek in background. I had the AD-200 mounted in a 12″x16″ softbox with my assistant hanging it just above camera centre. The flash was turned up to full power to balance the background. The AD-200 has just enough power to pull this off, but there is no way you could do this with one of my Nikon flashes.

High Speed Sync
I tried to do some high speed sync work in full daylight with the bicycle racer, but I just ran out of power for that. I have my eye on one of the larger AD-600 units, which should be able to handle that much better. I did some high speed sync tests in my studio and figure that at 1/500th, you’re losing about a stop of power over 1/200th, and at 1/1000th, you’re losing three stops of power. Can you balance full light at 1/1000th? Probably not with the softboxes I use, but with a more efficient head, no problem. How often are you balancing full light? Not really that often, and not if you can help it. If you need to shoot at 1/1000th in full light on any kind of regular basis, you’d probably be better off with the larger AD-600 unit.

Driver Jonathan Tippett with Protheis The Anti-Robot, a fighting robot under development in Squamish by Furrion Exo-Bionics. Photographed for the Squamish Chief. This crazy thing was about the size of a large elephant, and we were under the roof of a bombed out train workshop. It was raining really hard outside, so we had to stay under the roof. The Ad-200 was in a 24″x32″ softbox off to camera left and it lit the robot nicely. I put one of my SB-910’s turned up to full power synced with X1R tigger to the right behind robot to act as a kicker, but it didn’t really do very much. You can see the little splash of light on the right side of the frame. It gives you a good idea of how powerful the AD-200 is.

The Canadian Snowmobile Adventures rustic cabin in the Callaghan Valley, near Whistler. I was at this cabin, which takes a one hour ride in a snow cat to get to, for a wedding over Christmas. I wanted to get a shot of the cabin, so I packed in a tripod and the Godox flash. For this shot, I used a 30 second exposure, but even with that, since it was a moonless night, I wasn’t getting any light on the front of the cabin. I grabbed the flash that I had for the portraits and fired it off at full power just off from camera right.  It did a beautiful job of lighting the front of the cabin.

Colour and Exposure
In early January, I had a multi-day shoot at a Vancouver college to build an image library and some advertising pieces for their marketing department. We had two days in a row with nearly 1,000 photos per day shot with the Godox and we had no serious issues with shifts in colour or exposure. The colour balance on the AD-200 sits about 5700K, which matches the Nikon flashes pretty closely.

Some photos from the Abbotsford campus of Ashton College, a local vocational school in the Fraser River, that I did for their marketing department. The top image will end up being used on an advertising piece in the Vancouver Skytrain system, while the middle shot is for the dental assistant school. The lower photo is the lighting set up for the top shot. The Godox AD-200 and X-Pro trigger is really well suited for this kind of full day long commercial shoot. We shot here all day with no issues with over heating or running the battery down.

The X-Pro Flash Trigger
The AD-200 is great, but what really makes the system sing is the X-Pro trigger. It’s light years ahead of the Nikon SU-800 trigger I’ve been using for years. It has a big bright LCD screen with enough buttons on it that you never have to go into any of the menu items. All the relevant information is large and easy to read, and you can cycle though the power settings really quickly with the little control wheel. I never use off-camera flash with TTL, as I find it much more accurate toast the flash manually.

I have had some connectivity issues with the X-Pro, but since there’s an active AD-200 Facebook group, I was able to get some advice on the settings which has fixed it up. Changing the range setting from 0-300m to 0-100m helps a lot, and using the 17-32 channels instead of the 1-16 channels are musts as well. I’m not sure what’s up with channels, but with my Pocket Wizard slaves, the 17-32 channels are digital as opposed to analog, so it might be a similar kind of issue with the Godox.  The X-Pro also doesn’t like rechargeable batteries for some reason, so be sure to pick up a big load of Alkaline AA batteries.

Finally some real estate work. This is actually three different photos layered together in Photoshop. The first exposure I had the flash over my should, then I moved it over to light the kitchen, then finally over to the living room by the far window. Then I blended them together using layer asks in Photoshop. That sounds worse than it is, and is actually a pretty common technique for real estate photographers. Being able to adjust the lights via the X-Pro really make these shots a lot easier.

Beefs
The AD-200 is great, but it’s not perfect. There are a few issues on it that the guys at Godox should deal with at some point.

First, there’s a huge bolt sticking out the side of the bare bulb head, which I guess is to lock in accessories to the head. The problem is the flash doesn’t clear the S-bracket with bolt sticking out of it. I just wrenched it out, but it took some force, and while something definitely broke in there, it doesn’t seem to miss it. For the next version, put a flush mounted set screw in.

Speaking of the S-bracket, the screw that secures it to the stud on the lightstand is on the same side as the large tension handle on the pivot. If you have large hands like me, it’s next to impossible to screw it down. I’ve been working with studio lighting for 30 years and that’s the worst set up I’ve ever seen. Luckily, all you need to do to fix it is unscrew the pivot and reverse the bolt so that the handle is on the other side. The S-bracket is made of plastic instead of metal, but seems to be pretty robust so far.

The LED screens on both the AD-200 and X-Pro are completely scratched up after only a month of use. I’m seriously thinking of putting some clear packing tape over the LED to protect it. I’ve been using some of the Nikon flashes for years and the displays are totally clear. On the next version, it wouldn’t hurt Godox to replace the displays with some heavy duty gorilla glass.