Ellis Photographic Lighting

Ellis Photographic Lighting
For along time now, I have been meaning to write  a few words regarding my friends' photographic manufacturing business. I am greatly saddened that there is now virtually no record on the web of its existence or the ground breaking products they made.

Ellis Photographic Lighting Ltd was incorporated in 1986 by Peter Moss and his wife Anne - it traded  until around 2007. The name Ellis came from Peter's second name. The design of the products they produced was combination of Peter's tenacity and the technical genius of his associate Chris Thorpe.

Peter had been prior to this, one of the West Midlands most successful commercial photographers - with a large practice/studios on the Dudley Road, Halesowen. Many of today's well known Birmingham practitioners owe their initial training and success to the apprenticeships they received whilst working with him.

Chris, a close friend of mine, had started his photographic manufacturing career much earlier, by taking over the remains of the well-known 50's/60's lighting company Langham Lights Ltd (rival to Strobe).

During the 80's he continued to assemble bespoke Langham lighting generators and repair existing units.

1200j/ws unit manufactured for Donnelly Burns Nicklin - Circa 1985 (wired for Bowens)

Their first major product was the Ellis Strip Light - the first time I saw this was as a wooden prototype (around 1987) and it was being designed and tested at Chris's then base - the basement of the old chapel in Halesowen.

When the final moulds were completed, Chris (who had then moved from the chapel, when the lease had ended, to John Hilton's studio in Stirchley) relocated to Peter Moss's over flow studio at Gunbarrel Trading Estate, Cradley Heath to start mass producing them. Over 650 strips were produced, though some of the serial numbers can be misleading as they went up to around 1100.

The strip and the stand retailed for around £4800 + vat ea. Typically they were sold as pairs to photographers - Direct Lighting (along with several other rental houses around the world ) bought considerably more for rental.  Specialist installs were also undertaken at several auction houses such as Christie's for copying art work etc.

The strip light was 4ft long and contained single linear 5k tube which ran the length of the strip. It was designed to be upgradable with a modular control unit on the rear which could be swapped so as to allow compatibility with other flash manufacturers unit. The initial heads were made to run on:

- Broncolor Pulso Packs only (do not try to run these on any other Bron packs)
- Bowens Quad Packs 1.5K and 3K (there was one sample strip that had 2 smaller linear tubes which ran on a Bowens Estime/Traveller pack)
- Profoto (2 different versions - Acute and Pro 6a/7a only)
- Strobe

There was a later variant which ran on Ellis's own flash generators (1.5K and 3K)

The tubes were manufactured by hand by Stuarts of Manchester who went into receivership around 2007. I am not aware of any repairers who still carry stock of spare tubes, though the electronics can be easily repaired by such companies as Luminary Lighting in London.

The strip, itself, was totally over designed with ceramic moving parts on the barn doors and the rotating rear bracket which allowed the unit/barn doors  to be twisted into position and then stay fixed without any further tightening of clamps/knobs etc. The modelling light was a 4ft fluorescent tube which ran parallel with the flash tube. The unit was designed to either sit on the floor, be mounted onto a normal lighting stand (you needed a special parallel mounting arm and counter weight) or be fitted to its special designed stand (which also had a platform for a pack).

Be carefully using the strip off a stand - the poly injected casing can easily chip at the ends.

The stand had a unique feature, in that worked on a friction system so that it meant, the head/strip could be pushed/pulled to the right height and then simply let go of - the ceramic plates would then grip and there would be no need for additional screw/handles to be tightened.

There were 2 major accessories to the strip light - a large diffuser panel (with perspex) which fitted over the front of the strip (using 2 elasticated straps) and a comprehensive gel filter set (over 20qty coloured gels/ND filters mounted individually on perspex) which slid into the front diffuser slot.

Also, there was a 'v' shaped filter holder which came with the filter set.

The one design fault of the unit (there was no internal fan) was that if you fired off more than 50 full powered flashes in one go, you risked melting the trigger cable off the end of the tube. The tubes very rarely failed/lost gas - the majority of non-functioning models you will come across, have had either the trigger wire fail or several of the small transistors in the control module fail due to over heating. This can be easily fixed by Luminary Lighting.

Overall I feel Chris and Peter accomplished their task, which was to make the definitive strip light - the quality of light and evenness of spread is unparalleled. Also with its accessories and stand, it became an extremely versatile studio light source which could easily manipulated into nearly every position required. It had slight weaknesses such as the crudity of the modelling lamp and the duration of the flash (very slow by today's requirements) but lighting challenging products such as glass etc, its unrivalled.

Subsequent products followed:

A giraffe boom arm to hold the Ellis Strip
A range of Ellis Flash Packs and heads (these could be wired to either Ellis, Broncolor , Elinchrom or Bowens compatibility)

All the major components of the system were manufactured locally in Halesowen and the surrounding Black Country. Chris, Peter and many of the local suppliers could usually be found either at The Hadens Cross Pub or the Loyal Lodge at a lunch time discussing the finer points of it's design.

Also, there was a ring flash in development but this only proceeded to an early photo-type and a Mola light (several of which several were produced with a Bowens compatible head).

 

The majority of the Mola Lights that were produced ended up being sold to the BBC and were modified to run tungsten lamps and were used extensively in the 'Top Gear' studio.


Sadly Chris passed away in 2004 and all further developments of the range halted.

Thank you to Philip for allowing me to use images he had produced of his kit.