Comments on: Darkening With Light

By: Lucian

Lucian — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:57:56 +0000

(sorry, a disclaimer: do check the compatibility with your camera; I’m on Canon 40D)

By: Lucian

Lucian — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:53:56 +0000

Great article, thx !

I discovered the technique accidentally, and love it now. A sample here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlucian/3354029626/ , with the flash mounted on the camera.

For the wireless solution for Canon users (as some people asked), I recommend the ‘4 Channels Kit Flash Radio Remote Trigger PT-04 PT04 TM’ (10$ on ebay ); it doesn’t work as ETTL, but for that price I don’t care – I just trigger it … unless if you have a studio, where you may have very dynamic shooting, you can put the slave flash on manual, and in 2 test-shots you’ve set it up to the right power.

Lucian

By: walter

walter — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:05:25 +0000

Hallo, I am an amateur photographer, new to strobe photography. I own a D300, an SB900 and an SB800 flashguns. I try to use the SB900 as a master off-camer (driven by a Pocket Wizard unit connect via PC cable), I set the SB800 as a remote flash, the two units communicates but the slave (SB 800) flashes significantly late (a couple of secs.) – this doesn’t happen if I place the master (SB900) on the hot-show of my D300. I tried also to swap the two flashguns, but no success.
This also happens if I use a an SC-29 (TTL cord) to fire the master.
I have no clue on how to solve it.

Thanks in advance

By: Chas

Chas — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:10:40 +0000

I found this article for those of you using Sony equipment. It has some helpful setup info.

http://www.md-sulhan.com/alphastrobist/simple1a.html

By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:08:55 +0000

I’ve had success with this outdoors at night. I just had to find an area with nothing within the flash’s range besides my subject. It worked!

By: Chas

Chas — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:14:10 +0000

It sounds like you have your aperture set to small for the flash to take effect. If you are in manual mode leave the shutter speed to 1/160 and start opening your aperture until you get a good exposure. Email me from there and let me know how it goes.

By: Robb

Robb — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:40:54 +0000

Thanks. I made a mistake in what I typed: I set my pop-up flash compensation to -2 (all the way down). The off camera flash to 1/1. In wireless mode, the picture was so underexposed it looked like no flash at all. I tried all flash modes. Unless I bump up the on camera compensation, I can’t get lower than 1/160. My white balance is set to Flash. I feel like I’m not doing something because I even tried to use the off camera this weekend, in a room with decent natural like and that attempt also rendered underexposure. I guess I’m not understanding how the light works here and what’s going wrong.

By: Chas

Chas — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:09:23 +0000

Robb: The reason I had to stop down my aperture all the way to f22 was because I had set my flash power to 1/1 (Full Power). If you don’t want to blind your subjects you can open the aperture while at the same time lowering the power of the flash. Essentially, the more open your aperture is, the more powerful the flash becomes. Make sense? So 1: Don’t set your pop-up to 1/1, that’s full power and you want it as low as it will go. 2: Increase your off camera flash power to the desired setting and adjust your aperture to get a good exposure from there. ( I had set my off camera flash to full power so it would easily over power ambient light in the room, but it’s not really the best method for a real shoot.) Hope that makes sense.

By: Robb

Robb — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:21:51 +0000

I’m struggling with this technique. I’m shooting with a Sony a300, trying to use my Promaster 7500 flash as my off camera flash. In Manual, I could stop down to F22, but couldn’t get past 1/160. Even then, in wireless mode, I got pure darkness. Turned down my pop-up and flash to 1/1. The only way I got anything was to set my flash mode on anything but wireless, and then the shots looked like the pop-up was brighter than the flash only a few inches away from the subject. As I’m typing this, I read/realized that I didn’t zoom my flash, but still, having it so close should have made some difference. Any suggestions?

By: Toby

Toby — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:27:43 +0000

Don’t despair Indra!

Just because you can’t do it wirelessly doesn’t mean you can’t use off-camera flash!

You can get hotshoe adaptors which will work with many flashes and you can do it wired (which is what I’m doing at the moment. (hotshoe-to-hotshoe – like an extension lead for your flash)

You can also get a hotshoe-PC adaptor – the hotshoe goes on to your camerea, you plug in the PC cord, then at the other end you plug the PC cord into your flash. If you flash doesn’t have a PC cord slot (like mine doesn’t…boo) you can just get another adaptor to put the flash in.

COst wise, I think the adaptors are usually around £6.00 GBP and the sync cords not much more. I think my nissin hotshoe adaptor was about £20 GBP. I’m still learning, but I’ve got some nice shots with it.