The Nuts and Bolts of off-camera flash - part 2, manual flash

This is the 2nd article from F1Point0.com


From F1point0.com

As we mentioned in part 1, manual flash is essentially a “dumb” flash mode- meaning that no flash metering is done by camera or strobe. you simply adjust the power to whatever you want, and when the flash pops, it fires at that power, every time regardless.

Now aside from the control and creative aspects of using manual flash, (for more on that check the strobist blog) one of the great things about it is that it gives you the greatest range of hardware to work with. In essence, any strobe that has a manual setting will work with any camera capable of triggering a flash! NOTE - one *large* caveat to this is that some older strobes use a high trigger voltage, which can fry the delicate electronics in newer digital cameras. Just be careful if using old/used flashes and double check to make sure the voltage is safe for your camera. This isn’t an issue with any current/modern strobes AFAIK.

Of course the downside to having such a wide variety of hardware to work with is that there is no real establish “standard” for hooking it all together!

So let’s take a step back for a moment. Consider if you had a manual flash in your hotshoe, on camera. How does it fire? Well, as we discussed in part 1, to make it fire you just have to “close the circuit” in the “foot” to allow the capacitor to discharge, making the flash go pop. So what happens when you push the shutter is that the camera sends a little pulse to the center pin in the hotshoe, which creates that circuit and allows the flash to fire. Shutter clicks, flash goes pop, and voila - you got a flash exposure. So now in order to do the same thing with the flash *off* camera we need some way of getting that same “FIRE” pulse from the camera to to the strobe when you click the shutter release. That’s really it - all the various cables, pocketwizards, wireless trigger etc… are in essence doing the same, simple thing - providing a way of transferring the FIRE pulse from the camera to the strobe.

So - there are basically 2 ways of getting that trigger pulse from your camera to your off-camera strobe. You can use a wire that physically carries the signal directly from camera to flash (as if it were sitting in your hotshoe) or you can use some flavor of wireless transmitter, which “carries” the signal wirelessly. As the simplest (and likely cheapest) option, let’s talk about wires (or sync cables) first. Pretty straightforward - it’s just a piece of wire! One end connects to your camera, one end to the flash. You click the shutter, the signal goes down the wire, and the flash pops. Of course it’s the whole “connecting to camera and flash” that becomes confusing, since there are several different physical connectors that can be used!

Although the good news is that since there is no “communication” through the cable (remember all it is doing is physically transferring the “FIRE” pulse from the camera) the connectors are practically, if not physically, interchangeable. Meaning if you have connector X on camera and Y on flash, you simply need a cable with X on one end and Y on the other (or an adapter that converts X to Y)

The second piece of good news is that for all practical purposes, there are only 4 types of connectors you have to worry about. They are the “PC” connector, the “Household” or “HH” connector, the 1/4″ monoplug and the 1/8″ miniplug (shown below)

The PC connector is the closest thing there is to a “standard” for sync cables. Note this has nothing to do with “personal computer” it is simply the type of cable connector. Some flashes have built-in PC ports for a PC cable to plug into, and some camera bodies do as well. (pic shows the PC socket on a canon 580ex II) If you are lucky enough to have both a camera and flash with PC sockets - congratulations, simply get a PC cord, plug one end into the camera, one end into the flash and voila! your (manual) flash is now connected just as if it were in the hotshoe. Of course not all flashes and camera bodies have built in PC sockets, so what happens when we want to connect PC-socket-less cameras and strobes together?

Well, the camera still has a hotshoe and the flash still has a foot with that center “firing pin” in it, so we get ourselves some adapters. One sits in the camera’s hotshoe, and one connects to the flash’s foot (a hotshoe adapter) We can get these adaptors in various “flavors” with different connectors. The most straightforward ones will simply have a PC socket. So in essence you are simply adding a PC socket to your camera and flash via the hotshoe/foot. Connect the 2 adaptors with a PC cable, just as you would with built-in sockets and again you’re good to go. The fire pulse goes from the camera’s hotshoe, through the adapter, down the PC cable, through the adapter on the flash’s foot connects with the center pin, and pop goes the weasel! The beauty of this is that it will work with any camera/flash combination since it is just making the connection through the hotshoe (on camera side) and foot (on flash side). The camera doesnt care what flash you are using - it just sends it’s pulse regardless, and you can stick any flash you want in the shoe adapter at the other end, and it will fire since it’s just getting it signal through the foot just as it would on camera. Here are a couple of examples of hotshoe adapters with male PC and femae 1/4″ phono receivers:


Now personally I *hate* the PC standard. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I think the connectors are badly designed, fragile, and have a tendency to get damaged/bent out of shape or come loose at inopportune times. I dunno, maybe it’s just me. PC is generally the “accepted standard” so, if you are just starting out, it’s probably easiest to go with, since it’s rather ubiquitous.

The Household connector (HH) is an alternative to the PC cable. It functions exactly the same, except the physical connectors are different. The HH cables actually use the same 2 prong connector as a standard US electrical cord. I feel this is a much more robust and reliable connection personally, but I know that is arguable. The cool thing about the HH standard is that you can use ordinary household extension cords to extend/split your cable if needed. The downside to them is that there are no cameras or flashes (AFAIK) that have a HH port built in so you always need an adaptor on your flash’s foot and camera’s hotshoe to provide the necessary connector. I personally have a nice little HH cable that has a built in adaptor that fits into my camera’s hotshoe on one end and a standard HH prong on the other end. I slide the former onto my camera and plug the latter into an adaptor for my flashes foot and I’m good to go. (see below)

So when it really comes down to it, all you have to do to fire *any* flash off camera with a sync cable is:

* stick an adapter in your camera’s hotshoe
* stick an adapter on your flash’s foot
* connect the two with a cable.

The 1/8″ and 1/4″ connectors are generally used with wireless transmitters, so now lets talk a bit about wireless transmitters and manual flash.

The good news is that if you get the whole business with the adapters/cables this will be easy. Wireless transmitters are accomplishing the exact same thing (getting the “fire” pulse from camera to flash) they just do it a bit differently. There are a number of transmitters out there, the primary ones being the ubiquitious pocketwizards, along with the elichrom skyports and the so-called “ebay triggers”. The thing is *they all do the exact same thing* In essence there is no difference between the $200 pocketwizard and the $25 ebay trigger other than range reliablity (although that is a big difference - once you’ve torn your hair out after having 50% of your shots not fire due to a flakey ebay trigger, $200 will seem like a small price to pay for rock-solid reliablity) (16 channel ebay trigger shown: note the contact on the transmitter that connects to the center pin of the cameras hotshoe)

But I digress… in essence they way all wireless triggers work is that there is a transmitter that attaches to your camera and a recieciever that attaches to your flash. Just as with a cable, when you click the trigger your camera still sends that “fire” pulse - only this time it goes into the wireless transmitter. The transmitter says “aha, I see a “fire” pulse” and sends a RF (radiowave) signal to the reciever (attached to the flash). The reciever gets this signal, and goes “aha, the transmitter told me that the camera just sent a “fire” pulse” and then the reciever generates it’s own pulse, which goes to the flash. The flash pops, and bob’s your uncle… (this all happens in milliseconds).

Of course the “gotcha” with the wireless is that just like a cable, they need some way of connecting to your strobe. Generally the wireless transmitter (whether pocketwizard, skyport or ebay) sits directly in the hotshoe of your camera, and connects directly to the center pin, so there is generally nothing needed on that end. The receiver, however needs to be connected to the flash somehow. Fear not, though - it’s basically the same procedure as with a cable. You simply need a short cable that goes from the wireless to either the PC port directly (if your flash has one) or a hotshoe adaptor with a PC port in it. Pocketwizards and Skyports have a 1/8″miniplug connector (same as a normal headphone jack on a portable audio device), and actually come with a little 1/8″ to PC cord (meaning a 1/8″ miniplug on one and and a PC connector on the other - See below) in that case all you need is a hotshoe adaptor for the flash foot that has a PC socket and you’re good to go. I didn’t have a pocketwizard to illustrate, but the 16ch ebay transmitter happens to have the same socket as a PW, so just pretend it’s a pocketwizard in the picture!

The ebay triggers are slightly different - they come in 2 flavors, the 4 channel and the 16 channel. The 4 channel have the advantage of actually having a hotshoe built in, so they attach straight to the flash foot, no cables required! The 16 channel use a 1/4″ phono plug connector, but they also have a PC socket on the back (which tends to be kind of flakey) so you can either connect them to a hotshoe adapter with a pc socket (using a short PC cable) or you can get a hotshoe adaptor that takes a 1/4″ phono plug directly. Best place I’ve found is www.flashzebra.com. The guy who runs it, Lon, is a really fantastic guy and has pretty much any adapter you can think of for conecting cameras and strobes, particularly “specialty” ones like the 1/4″ phono hotshoe adapter for use with the 16 channel ebay triggers. (direct link to product here). Check it out for all your crazy flash-connecting needs.

16ch ebay receiver and hotshoe adapter with 1/4″ phono from flashzebra:

Anyway, that’s pretty much it - hope that clears up some of the confusion regarding hooking up strobes for manual flash! Stay tuned for next time when we will talk about wireless TTL!

P.S. I should also mention that there is a 3rd way to trigger a manual flash, namely “Optical slave mode” Not all flashes have this capability but for those that do it basically means that the strobe will fire whenver it “sees” another flash with it’s optical sensor. This can be useful for example if you fire one flash with a camera and have a second one in optical slave mode. The second flash will “see” the flash from the first one and fire itself. The dowsides to this are 1) it will fire whenever it sees *any* flash so if there are other folks around using cameras with flash, they will be setting it off as well 2) it requires the strobe be able to “see” the burst of light from the first flash, so it becomes unreliable in bright sunlight and finally 3) it will not work in combination with wireless TTL flashes (more on that in part 3)


Visit the Author Blog HERE

The Nuts and Bolts of off-camera flash - Part 1, Basics

F1point0.com Has a great article on off camera flash like a precursor to Strobist.com

So unless you’ve been living under a rock (photographically speaking) for the past year or so, you’ve probably heard of David Hobby, AKA The Strobist. The strobist blog has been singlehandedly responsible for introducing a whole new wave of photographers to the beauty and mystery that is: off camera lighting!

The problem is - a lot of this stuff is still confusing. Heck, I didn’t “get it” the first time I read through lighting101. Or the second. Or probably not even the third. And a lot of the time, the problem isn’t conceptual, it often comes down to the “nuts-and-bolts” issues - eg, things like “what works with what”, “how do I connect x to y” and “why is there a black bar across my image when I use my flash off camera but not on camera”

What I am going to do in this series of articles, is break down, step-by-step the various hardware and methods needed to get your flash off camera and firing properly. We’re not going to worry about lighting theory or anything like that - just the “nuts and bolts”.

* In par 1 (here) we’re going to talk about the basics of how a flash works, and the different modes you can use it in.
* In part 2 we will discuss options for manual triggering.
* In part 3 we will discuss wireless ttl flash
* and finally in part 4 we will deal with some miscellaneous topics, such as x-sync, HSS, rear-curtain sync etc…

So without further ado, lets talk about getting your flash out of the hotshoe and into the wild where it belongs!

Now first of all it is important to understand how a flash actually fires. In actuality it is quite simple - if you look at the bottom of your flash (or “foot”) there is an electrical contact, the center pin. If you have a newer “system” flash, it may have other pins as well, but they all have the one center pin. Now if you look at the inner sides of the foot, they are also metal. When a connection is made between the center pin and the sides of the foot, the flash fires.

That’s it. You could make your flash fire by connecting these two contacts with a paperclip even. (although I wouldn’t recommend it and am not responsible if you electrocute yourself trying it!)

So in essence, triggering your flash is simply a matter of making the connection that allows it to release it’s charge as a burst of light. The catch, of course, is *how we make this connection*.

Now let’s step back for a minute. Before we think about triggering the flash lets look at the primary “modes” of the flash. In essence, a flash only has 1 adjustment - power. In other words, “how much light does it put out when it pops”. However, there are several ways of *calculating* how much power is needed or desired for a particular situation.

1. manual. Back in the day, all flashes were manual, meaning they were essentially “dumb” *you* set the power output by hand, based on what you calculated was needed.
2. auto. auto flash is basically a way that the flash itself measures the amount of light needed based on settings you input. We will not talk be talking much about auto-flash since I believe manual or ttl are more useful 99% of the time.
3. TTL. Stands for “Through The Lens”, and is a method where the camera and flash “talk” to each other and calculate the appropriate amount of flash automatically based on the camera settings and a meter reading.

For purposes of this discussion, we are just going to talk about manual and ttl flash, as I think they are the most useful. The point to all this is that, despite having the same outcome (firing the flash) the *methods* for triggering your flash are very different depending on whether you will be using manual mode or TTL.

In part 2 we will talk about options for triggering your flash in manual mode, what kind of hardware you need for each, and pros and cons for each option. Stay tuned!

View Original Article HERE

Outdoor Lighting Lessons for Bogen

Bogen recently offered a free one-hour webinar to help with common outdoor lighting problems. A webinar is a great way to get information in real time, you log onto the visual part through the Internet call a tool free phone number to follow along with the audio. Participants are able to ask questions in real time, and polls are taken during the seminar so the instructors can tailor information to the skills level of the majority.

David Fisher and Christopher Abbiss lead the program, highlighting five specific problems when photographing outdoors; working in bright sunlight, making flash photos look more natural, blurring backgrounds, composing your shot and improving nighttime photos. Prizes were given away at the end to three lucky participants. Here are a few tips to take from this program:

1. Don’t be afraid to use a flash to offset or balance the sun. A fill flash outdoors will help rid your photo of harsh shadows. Use off-camera flash to change to angle of the light to more realistically mimic the angle of the sun.

2. Use light modifiers like an umbrella, a Lastolite Ezy Box softbox or Tri-grip reflector to control the light, soften the light and make it look more natural.

3. Use a shallow depth of field to clean up backgrounds and long lenses to compose tighter, alleviating distracting backgrounds. With a shallow depth of field the background will blur allowing your subject to stand out.

4. See the scene before you ever look through the viewfinder. Take in the scene then consider what would make the cleanest background and most pleasing composition. Use long lenses to compose tighter and rid your photo of distracting backgrounds.

5. Nighttime photos will have better results when the flash is turned off. Use a monopod or tripod to stabilize the camera and don’t be afraid to experiment with longer exposures.

Most of the information was pretty basic but was presented very clearly with photo examples and a list of equipment used. This was the first free webinar by Bogen, check the Bogen website for upcoming sessions.

—Melissa Macatee
PopPhoto Flash Blog
Contributing Blogger

Take Group photo's That Rock

Straight for photojojo.com


The goggling stares. The stiff, tortured stances. The false grins. The symptoms are all there.

You’ve got a bad case of Group Photo.

Fear not! Dr. Jojo, photoologist, at your service. And I’ve got a patent-pending, never-fail, miracle cure that’ll have you taking happy, fun group portraits whenever you want!

Here’s how:

Step 1: Set the timer on your camera. Make it short, like ten seconds.

Step 2: Arrange everybody in your shot, making the sure the camera’s zoomed out enough so you won’t cut off anybody’s head.

Step 3: Here’s the tricky part: have everybody that’s going to be in the photo come around behind the camera.

(Except Great Aunt Lily who don’t move so good. She can stay.)

Step 4: Ready? Press the button! Now everybody has to run to get into the photo before the timer goes off. Yikes! Hurry!

Now wasn’t that fun? And we can almost guarantee you’ve got a picture of smiling people actually enjoying themselves. Maybe even injuring themselves!

Now if you can just convince them all to do it one more time…

SundryBuzz’s Cure for the Group Photo Blues
Thanks for the tip, Nichole!

Photo credit: Steph Goralnick.

Full article here.
http://photojojo.com/content/tips/take-better-groups-photos/