Yes, spouses do make great "Voice Activated" lightstands.
Except mine...
She's tone deaf...(coincidentally the exact tone of my voice).

Well, Gerri did all the photography this time around...I got some great video....
It's all about makin memories for the kids!

The Walleye weren't biting, but Crappies and Northern Pike sure were!

go with Pentax 360's
you lose some power and swivel, and 5p conector... but gain better manual control plus full p-ttl
if you got the k10 or k20 you can use both with the on camera flash for wireless.

So did you offer to "Shoot" the bank manager before he generously offered to hand over the money?

actually that multi pop strobe effect can be put to good use in arcitecture, or product/still life photography.
say those floors for example......

say you have several flashes, set up to light the floor, but not enough power to get the dof you want.

you can calculate how many pops you'd need to "Build up" your exposure to get the right aperture you need for dof.
set a long enough shutter speed to cover the number of flash pops ( and recycle times) you need and set up the 500 ftz to give you that many pops in the right amount of time, and fire your shot.

five or ten half power pops from a couple ftzs will certianly match the full power pops of my elinchrom studio strobes (and maybe then some).

yep.
just don't expect p-ttl, or even ttl (unles you have an ist d or ds2), but good for auto, manual down to 1/32 power, multi pop (strobe), bounce/swivel, and powerful too.

here's another fast way.
use the rectanular or circular selection tool. feather the edges.
copy a section of good area, and paste it into a new layer. grab that piece and move it over the area to be patched.
set blend mode to "Darken" set opacity to about 30%
done. operation time : 15 seconds.

I've seen professional models that weren't exactly stunners.....
You just need to make these girls look and feel thier best.
You don't need to maker her look like somebody else....just make her look prettier than she thinks she is. Make her look her best.

The Pentax strobes can be made do nearly anything studio strobes can do, in terms of lighting a subject. You just have to work with them, and learn.

Portable, versatile, battery operated, automated features, are what pocket strobes do best.

Grids, snoots, barndoors, softboxes, umbrellas, gels, fast recycle times, high power, and burning through hundreds of shots per hour are what pro studio strobes do best.

That's why I own both.

To go back to my El camino analogy, My elinchroms are a heavy duty moving truck for hard workloads.
My pentax and vivitar strobes are like little sedans. They can both get you to where you are going, but there are somethings you can do easily with one but not the other.

To buy low powered, flimsy studio styled strobes, is to teather yourself to an ac oulet, with a flash that can't handle the heavy workload of a pro unit, and without the p-ttl, (wireless), five to seven stop manual control, and battery power of a portable.

the floor job should be doable with portable pocket flashes.

oops sorry, some housekeeping took down some stuff, forgot about that recent link...will repost with a link later today when I get back to my desktop computer.

Here's a few snapshots from our fishing trip.
c&c welcome...
link