Shooting with speed; the Broncolor Scoro S

Camera & Technology

September 22, 2021 ·

Andrew Paquette

Figure 1 Dropped Lily (detail), ISO 50, 1/1600s, f/10, t=1/4000s

The last time I wrote an article for this site, I had just moved back to the United States from the Netherlands. At the time, my goal was to put together a completely new photography portfolio and then put some time and effort into marketing it to clients in New York City. That work had just started to pay off in the form of some portraits for Verizon and another for Bicycling Magazine when everything shut down for covid-19.
Until recently, my portfolio was comprised entirely of portraits, divided evenly between athletes (my focus) and non-athletes. Thanks to the covid crisis, working with people was out of the question for a while, then difficult but not impossible, and now it is possible but not quite back to normal. During this interruption, I took photos of “American Places”; empty diners, gas stations, and farms. I enjoyed making the photos and like the results. On several of the shoots, I caught myself wondering if I wanted to continue shooting architecture once things got back to normal. At the same time, I wondered if I might be better off switching to products so that I could work remotely at my home studio more easily.
The difference between the two options was that if I intended to focus on architecture, I was going to upgrade from my Phase One XF camera with an IQ3-100 digital back to the mirrorless Phase One XT with an IQ4-150 digital back. That system would give me higher resolution in a much smaller camera with tilt/shift capability built into the camera. If I focused on still life instead, I wanted to upgrade my lighting gear with a pack and head system.
The justification for upgrading the camera came down to the ability to correct perspective in camera and a higher resolution sensor. Unfortunately, it meant not only a new camera and digital back but a new lens as well because none of my XF lenses would fit the XT camera. The lights were easier to justify. A pack and head system would be just as useful for the portraits I’ve been making all along, would be better than the monoblock lights I have been using with the Broncolor Para 133 light modifier, and they would give me more flexibility with small subjects if I got the right lights and modifiers.
I decided to get the lights. As much as I liked the idea of shooting with the XT, my current system is still an excellent choice for taking architectural shots, even without a tilt/shift lens available [UPDATE: now there is a 120 mm T/S lens . The lights dealt with several problems I’ve encountered on a variety of shoots. The bottom line is that to capture the images I wanted, usually athlete portraits, I needed speed. To get it, I needed more power, as Tim Allen might say. I also had experienced problems mounting monolights to the Para 133. Twice, assistants have broken the monolights by failing to properly secure the lightstand with sandbags before mounting the light. A pack and head system would allow the use of a much smaller and lighter lamp head that would not pose any serious risk of overbalancing the light stand. A third reason is that I wanted to get at least one Broncolor picolight so that I could get in close to small subjects.
In the past, I got by with two portable lighting kits, each of which contained two lights. The first is the 500 w/s Profoto B1, the second is Broncolor’s Siros L 800w/s. I also had a couple of inexpensive LED Clios, used for special effects. I upgraded by buying the Broncolor Scoro S 3200 pack, 2x Broncolor 3200 w/s Unilights, and 1x 1600 w/s Picolight.
I have worked with rented pack and head systems from ProFoto and Broncolor in the past but always had an assistant manning the devices, so I never had much opportunity to explore the differences between pack and head and monolight systems. The couple of times I had rented pack and head systems but no assistant, I didn’t have the time to fool around with them, so I just got my shots and then packed up. Now that I had my own Scoro S, one of the fastest packs in the world, I could play with it all I liked.
According to the specs, the Scoro S can fire up to 50 flashes a second, at 1/10,000s per flash. That speed is measured at T=0.1, which takes into account the start of the flash, peak, and end. This is opposed to ProFoto, which uses the T=0.5 standard. That standard starts at the peak of the flash and continues to the end. In other words, 1/10,000s at T=0.1 is significantly faster than T=0.5, which translates to about 1/14,000s. To achieve that speed, the unit has to fire at minimum power, .1.
The power settings on the Scoro are measured in f-stops rather than power output. A power setting of 9.0 on a 10.0 scale equals 50% power. Each full stop down halves the power.

Flash duration for the 800 w/s Siros L ranges from 1/250s at full power to 1/4400s at minimum power (2.0). That is comparable to the Scoro except the Scoro has four times the power output at equivalent speeds. Because the Siros L can fire almost as fast as the Scoro, the two work well together to prevent motion blur.
Although I bought the lights as part of a project to create product shots for my portfolio, I also wanted them for action shoots with athletes and models later. To test them, I decided to make a series of photos of flowers in motion along with splashes of water. The goal was to make the flowers appear to be as static as possible while creating as much action as possible in the shots. The shots were more difficult than I expected because the size and rigidity of the flowers I used had a major impact on the settings I used.
My preference for almost all shoots is to shoot at f/11. I would have shot these flowers at f/11 as well if they were still. To get the right depth of field, a focus stack would do the trick. For moving flowers however, a focus stack is impossible. Therefore, I had to get the right depth of field in one shot. That meant shooting the larger flowers at f/20 and the smaller ones at f/12, with the rest at f/14 and f/16.
I usually set my shutter to 1/125 when shooting with flash to save wear and tear on my leaf shutter. For this shoot, I wanted to completely eliminate any stray ambient light, so I set it to 1/1600s.
When I shot basketball athletes in the Netherlands, the best shutter speeds for capturing fast action started at 1/2000s. That was enough for most situations but extremely quick movements sometimes required 1/4000s. With that in mind, I initially set the Scoro to 1/2620s in speed mode. That meant 4.2 total power usage for two lights. That setting worked for some flowers but not others. The more flexible the flower was, the faster it moved when it made contact with the bottom of the vase. The worst of these was an astrantia flower, which had very thin, supple petals combined with a thin but rigid stem. To eliminate motion blur on that flower, I had to shoot at 1/5250s (about 1.4 total power, or about 9 joules). Keep in mind that these are t=0.1 values, not ProFoto’s t=0.5 standard. Translated to the way ProFoto describes flash duration, I shot the astrantia at about 1/7000s to prevent motion blur.
The IQ3-100 has a minimum ISO of 50. That is the best ISO to use for almost everything but it didn’t work for most of these flower shots because the Scoro didn’t put out enough energy at the required speed settings. For that reason, the ISO for most of the shots was set between 200-800.
If my studio had been larger, I would have used my 150 mm lens and captured these from a greater distance to increase the depth of field and use a larger aperture, such as f/8-f/12. That would have allowed the use of lower ISO settings or even faster flash durations.
The images in this article utilized 5 lights: 1x Unilight, 1x Picolight, 2x Siros L, 1x B1. The camera was a Phase One XF with an IQ3-100 digital back and a Schneider Kreuznach 110 mm LS macro lens. The camera was tethered to a MacBook running Capture One. I didn’t have an assistant for this, so I did all my focusing in live view and fired the shutter release with a remote trigger.
Overall, I was very happy with the Scoro for a number of reasons. First, despite its 26 pound weight, it is designed so well that it is very easy to move around the studio. Second, I loved the ability to control my lights from the Scoro’s main panel. From there, you can set the power for each of three lights individually or all of them together, turn lights and modeling lights on or off, set multiple flash bursts, check flash duration, and many other things. Alternatively, you can use the Broncolor app BronControl from an iPad or phone to control the lights.
I preferred the Scoro’s panel for most things but used the app when I wanted to adjust the Siros L lights in the scene. This might not seem like a big deal to some readers but for me, it was. The reason is that I found myself utilizing the flexibility offered by the well-designed Scoro menus more often than I had ever attempted with other lights because it was so much easier to use. Also, all the information I needed to make decisions was right there on the panel, making it very easy to either make the right decision or a good stab at it. What that meant was more creative iterations in the same amount of time and a better end result.
I loved the fact that I no longer had to worry about my batteries dying partway through a shoot and missing a shot. Also, the Scoro recycle speed was fast enough to keep up with focus stack settings or multiple shots fired in a burst. This had been a problem in the past with other lights that couldn’t recycle fast enough to keep up with a focus stack, thus leaving dark frames in the middle that had to be thrown out. The Scoro didn’t miss a single shot in my focus stack tests with between 20-40 images each stack.
I did not test the Scoro in normal mode, so I don’t know what the color difference is between normal and speed mode. In speed mode, the images were consistently cool. It was easy to fix with a quick color temperature adjustment in Capture One but it had to be done.
Many articles on photography emphasize the importance of lighting over camera features. After upgrading my lights, I totally agree. To my eyes, the Scoro system has a bigger impact on the resulting images than any of my camera upgrades.
Below are a few of the shots from my Scoro test.

Figure 2 Alstroemeria, ISO 50, 1/1600s, f/12, t=1/4000s

Figure 3 Astrantia, ISO 200, 1/1600s, f/11, t=1/5250s

Figure 4 Calla Lily, ISO 200, 1/1600s, f/16, t=1/4000s

Figure 5 Crocosia, ISO 200, 1/1600s, f/14, t=1/3500

Figure 6 Gentiance, ISO 200, 1/1600s, f/9, t=4000s

Figure 7 Hybrid Delphinium, ISO 400, 1/1600s, f/11, t=4000s

Figure 8 Iris, ISO 50, 1/1600s, f/8, t=4000s

Figure 9 Lily, ISO 800, 1/1600s, f/20, t=4250s

Figure 10 Pink and white flower, ISO 400, 1/1600s, f/11, t=4000s

Figure 11 Rose, ISO 400, 1/1600s, f/16, t=4000s

Andrew Paquette

September 2021

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Andrew Paquette

See all articles by Andrew Paquette

Andrew Paquette started his career in 1986 as an editorial artist in New York City. Since then, he has worked in the video game, comic book, and feature film industries in various art roles, including as art director. More recently, he has taken up photography, first as a hobby but now as a serious creative outlet, with particular interest in commercial portrait photography.