Nice mainstream story, and a 'can you ID'

That's interesting. You'd expect a photographer like that to be working with top shelf gear. But the description makes it sound like they're marketing it as a lower priced alternative to high priced gear.

I'm also a bit surprised to see a ring flash being used for portraits like that. I know little about lighting concepts so it's not a surprise that I didn't know, I guess, but I really thought that ring flashes would have been the opposite of what you'd want for portrait shooting.

It's clearly a different sort of ring light than what I'm used to seeing, though. The stuff I'm used to seeing seem to be made for macro shooting. This thing is a lot bigger, and presumably higher powered (especially with the requirement for external power).

 

that flared lens shade looks like it throws the light out fan shaped, which would make sense, these are for baseball cards, where you want a lot of clear uniform detail and facial detail, almost like a cut out style or one of those fatheads

 

Dan, you're right that most of the ringlights you see are designed for macro work because that's what they are most often used for.

These large portrait ring flashes became big in fashion photography in the 90's, when they were used as the only strobe in the shoot. Ring flashes create a soft wrapping light, which when used by itself is very uniform, and when overused becomes boring. The latest trend is to use it as a fill light with some other harder light source in the photo, which is exactly what Gregg is doing in the first photo... using the sun as the hard source and the ringflash as the fill.

 

Very interesting. Like I said, I don't really understand lighting... I'm trying to read up on it, I know how important it can be, but so far the most I get involved with it is that some of the pictures I take look good and some look bad, and I'm reasonably certain that lighting plays a big role in that.