Originally Posted by HiFiGuy1
Nope, but I preach Murphy's law at every opportunity. As they said in the movie GI Jane, "Two means one, one means none." If you go into every job expecting a failed piece of equipment, you will be better able to cope. Sometimes it's the little things - with yucky batteries, my 580EX IIs tend to drop into TTL mode (i.e. not E-TTL II, TTL), which leads to lots of super-overblown shots. I went through three flashes one morning at a shoot (coincidentally my 1D3 wouldn't stop throwing Error 99s, so I had to punt to my Rebel XTi as well). But, there was a trunk full of gear (kryptonite?) very close to the action, so I kept trading out gear until I had stuff I could shoot with. Then it rained.
I'm leaning towards continuous lighting for price reasons, and to some degree longevity. Canon says you can get 150-700 shots per battery set on a 580. To shoot at f/8 (maybe f/5.6) and reasonable ISOs, you'll probably be living close to full power. Five shots per couple means you can only shoot 30 couples on a set of batteries. If you were shooting my high school prom, you'd need 10 sets of batteries. If you had three flashes (key, fill, background/hair), you're looking at 120 AAs, or $400 in Eneloops. Wanna be booked for two consecutive nights? Plan on another $400 in Eneloops, $400 in chargers, or a combination thereof. Worse, can you really tolerate 10 battery changes in a night? Yes, you could go with the Canon battery packs, dropping you to 5 battery changes in a night, but you still need the $400 in batteries, plus $450 in battery packs and ideally $500 in extra battery trays. Doesn't a pair of $25-50 spare light bulbs sound easier?
The Vivitars are popular for strobists, due to their price tag and feature set, if manual AA flashes are your thing.
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