The shopping, shipping, wrapping, and cooking is almost done! Merry Christmas to all of the supporters of our photography – blog readers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and everyone else that we have photographed this year. We are celebrating the season by giving gifts, spending time with family, making more photos, and enjoying the very COLD weather! We hope all of you are doing much the same.
This is a present from my mom to herself! Yes, I did help her pick it out. It has a nice snap to it’s shutter (like the all have) and lots of good upgrades over her old D40. My mom just wanted it because IT’S RED!! Plus, she wants to shoot video along with her photos. I guess I will be giving her the gift of photo lessons for the foreseeable future. I am sure that many of those will be future blog posts. The gears are already spinning as another year of blogging starts soon.
I have already eaten too much for this holiday, but I have been enjoying it! All the houses are full of the smells of the season. Too bad that cameras cannot capture that along with the pictures. I will do my best to capture some memories, but take a lot of time away from the camera to get more to eat! Merry Christmas to you and all of your loved ones!
The holiday rush for shopping is almost here, so camera manufacturers are getting into the fray with lots of new products. I am happy with my current setup for most events, but there has been some occasion where having more options for triggering multiples flashes would have come in handy. Working with some other photographers on their projects started me thinking on how I can accomplish this with my existing equipment. They have their own systems, but since I have different gear, I needed to do some thinking.
The monolights I use in my event photography are Elinchrom Style RX 600s which are triggered by the Elinchrom Skyport remote. These fit into the hot shoe connection on your camera. I wanted to have the ability to trigger a speedlight at the same time that the monolight is fired. Althought I could set the speedlight go off the optical slave, it will fire anytime that another flash is fired. In most events now, many have a camera. That would burn the batteries too quickly if this happens. Also it would probably ruin everyone else’s photos that will trigger my flash. Here is my slick solution, that I will try at the next opportunity:
Directly connected to the camera is a PocketWizard MiniTT1 for Nikon. Also connected to the hotshoe connection on top of the MiniTT1 is the Elinchrom Skyport. The MiniTT1 is designed to send a radio signal to an off camera flash that is connected to a FlexTT5, and pass the shutter signal through it’s hot shoe on top. Usually another speedlight is connected on that top hot shoe, but I connected the Elichrom Skyport and experimented to see if both flashes would fire. Here are the results:
The Skyport will also get the signal leaving the TT1 on the camera on! I had the Speedlight on a different channel just to see if it would pass the signal while not making a connection to another unit. When I had the MiniTT1 off, it did not pass the signal to the Skyport. So I tried it with both of them on:
Success! I tried this on all available channels, and everything seemed to work. It was just in my basement, so I don’t know the range of this setup, or how it will work over a long shoot, but the early tests show promise. Once I try this in a more demanding application, I’ll post the results here. Let me know if you have tried something similar, and if you have run into any trouble with this setup.
Of course you can zoom your lenses, but did you know you can zoom your speedlight flash? Depending on the model that you have, your flash head can be moved internally. On the Nikon SB-910, the flash head can be zoomed from 24mm to 200mm – a much larger range than their previous model, the SB-800 which had a range of 24mm to 105mm.
Speedlight Features
If you have this flash connected to modern Nikon cameras, the flash and the camera will talk to each other. They will automatically set the zoom of the flash to match the focal length of the lens that you are using by default. This is a great feature! As you use a longer focal length, the flash head will automatically zoom so that more flash power is given where you need it. Here are some example photos showing the difference in the light produced by the flash at different zoom lengths:
This first photo has the flash zoomed out to 24mm. It is giving it’s largest spread of light against the wall. If you need to cover more area with the flash, this is will cover a wider area. This also corresponds to a wider area seen by a camera lens set at 24mm.
At 70mm, the light beam becomes more focused. There is not as much spread of light up and down from the flash. The more you zoom in with your lens, the less that you need the light to be spread out across the frame, so this only flashes what you need without worrying about the areas that are not going to be seen in camera.
The tight beam of light that comes from the flash at 200mm is the most extreme setting. If you are zoom out this far with your lens, there will be a corresponding small area that you need to iluminate that far from the camera. Having these options for you gives you creative possibilities to focus light. You can manually set the zoom on the flash apart from the focal length of the lens. This works well to create more dramatic portraits just by zooming the light you are already carrying! Try it next time and let me know how it goes.
