Elinchrom Deep Octa For Bowens

I have been using the Bowens Wafer 100 for about a year and it’s a great low profile octo shaped softbox. The light quality is lovely and has some good diffusion material to mix up the type of light it produces. There is only one issue - it is not easy to take up and down, so I invariably only use it in the studio or when I don’t  have far to go from the car. I had seen the Elinchrom Deep Octa (which has a snazzy fold open design and packs away quite small) at a trade show and went looking for anyone who was using these on Bowens heads but no luck. Talking to the guys at Flash Centre it seemed that Elinchrom only supply a custom fit attachment for Elinchrom or Profoto and there was no obvious way of using a different speedring. I like a challenge and have power tools to hand so thought it would be worth a gamble to get one ordered up and see if I could get it on the Bowens somehow. Once it turned up I soon realised that Elinchrom really didn’t want you to mess with the attachment but took a drill to it anyway. After getting through the 8 rivets holding the thing together I popped the holder apart to reveal the speedring, took the Bowens one I already had for my softbox, popped it in and screwed it together with 8 bolts. Done.  You do have to be careful as you are drilling though as I managed to slightly crack my ring as I was a little off on one of the rivets but thems the breaks.

There you have it, one conversion of an Elinchrom Deep Octa to Bowens, I can also just undo the bolts and pop the Elinchrom speedring back in if I need to. It’s not all positive however, as getting the speedring to lock and unlock is a little tricky as you need to create quite a lot of contact friction on the speedring (acheived by pressing down on it with your fingers which twisting the head with your other hand). It’s usable but not ideal and probably explains why Elinchrom don’t supply a Bowens ring as standard. Here are a few pics of the conversion:

1 year ago  /  1 note