I've been looking for a field flash solution for a while. I was just about to splurge on some Elinchrom Quantums with battery packs, but really... if I'm in the field and setting up outside I've decied I want something even more portable than that. It's a lot of money and weight for something I just may not want to use.
Often when I'm shooting on location I'm taking my clients walking more than a few meters from the car, were going out into fields, down walking paths, getting to those spots where hauling a huge pair of battery pack flashes are going to be murder. Right now I've been happy with the portability and weight of my pair of Sb700's, but not with the performance.
I run one as a rim light and one with a shoot through umbrella. I'm getting decent light, but I'm running into a few issues.
using the SB700 without any light modifiers is not producing enough power for a proper rim effect. It's almost there....I'm thikning if it just had a full stop more power it would get there. Now I could also try a beauty dish to try and spread and amplify the light a bit more...
Anyways, I'd consider any battery powered strobe that is portable that I can hook up to my wireless triggers (right now Elinchrom Universal Skyport...but thinking of moving over to Pocketwiz in the future). I know at this point if I'm not going with Nikon I will loose the CLS advantage (Which I love), but at the end of the day line of sight is usually blocked with a rim light anyways.
What would be ideal is to add one more flashgun/strobe to my collection that I could use as a rim light that throws more light and I can add a radio trigger system too that will still allow me to use CLS. Then still use CLS on the pair of SB700's and use a two light setup to light the front/side of my subjects. So manual power control on the rim light, and full CLS on the SB's
Camera is a D800.