StellaPro Reflex:

Alejandro Gutierrez has understood the importance of acing a wedding shoot from the get-go. Capturing the moments of the day in their full beauty transforms them into gifts of memory that are handed down through generations. For the Guadalajara-based photographer, that makes it essential to work with the most beautiful, reliable, and versatile light he can find—in other words the StellaPro Reflex. Gutierrez started photographing weddings at a low point in his life. He’d lost all his money to a business fraud and fallen into a terrible depression. When one of his best friends invited him to her wedding, he was too broke to buy her a gift, so he decided to dust off his high-school photography skills and frame his best shot from the wedding as a gift.

“When she came back from her honeymoon, I brought her the pictures,” says Gutierrez. “That day, she was really angry with the wedding photographer she had hired. She said he had done a terrible job, she’d paid a lot of money, and she didn’t like any of the pictures. Her album was in the trash.” Gutierrez figured if she didn’t like the professional photos, she’d really hate his. “But when I showed her my pictures,” he says, “she started to cry. She said, ‘Alejandro, these are the best pictures I have ever seen. You’ve saved the memories of my future children.’” Other friends started asking him to photograph their weddings, and his new career took off. Gutierrez uses at least a bit of lighting in nearly all of his shots. “I really like natural light,” he says, “but if I can improve my pictures with a strobe—why not? I try to do it in a natural-looking way.” The StellaPro Reflex first caught his eye because of its technical wizardry. Its ultraportable modular design houses a first-of-its-kind hybrid LED that switches seamlessly between strobe and continuous light.

But it’s when Gutierrez and his assistants put the StellaPro Reflex to work that he was really impressed. The beautiful, consistent quality of light just blew away the strobes they’d been using. “We did the same pictures with our typical strobes and the StellaPro,” he says, “and the final picture is totally different.” Now he uses it for every phase of the wedding day, from outdoor portraits that just need a little fill to late-night partying captured with high-powered blasts of flash. For the most subtle touch of light, he switches on the StellaPro’s continuous mode and dials in just the level he needs. “I sometimes have situations where I need light, but even the lowest setting on the strobe is too much,” he explains. “With the StellaPro, it’s easy to take the light level down so that it’s like the light of a candle.”

What really earned the StellaPro Reflex its permanent spot in his kit was its killer performance. “Maybe 80 percent of my pictures with flash are on high speed,” Gutierrez says. “With a regular strobe, it overheats too easily. For every ten shots, you miss one. And sometimes that one shot is the shot.” Because the StellaPro Reflex S can shoot up to 20 frames a second, Gutierrez and his second shooter can share a single light without tripping over each other. And when combined with the fact that Reflex can burst at full power 10,000+ times off a single battery, there’s no need to hold back. “You can both just keep shooting,” he says, “and you don’t miss a shot.”