Hynek on Photography |
My endless journey to photography mastery plus pictures I've found worthwhile. |
I'm right back from Malaysia and the trip was a blast. Of course, I have gazillions of pictures that will take forever to sort and edit.
But one special evening is already done as the editing was the thing I was looking forward like crazy: It's the day spent in a longhouse of the Iban tribe deep in the rain forest of Borneo.
I can tell you.
It sucks when you look forward to do some portraits of native people in Borneo's rain forest and your soft box breaks a few days before departure.
Bonus points for my 72-77mm step-up ring not arriving although the vendor told me that they shipped it already last Sunday.
Now you now what sucks. FML.
I have to admit that I made one fundamental misconception some time ago: I thought that I can't activate my Nikon SB-600 without flashing the object with my pop-up flash. After all, even when I set the intensity to "--", the pop-up flashes to control my slave.
But: It flashes before the exposure starts thus it doesn't affect the picture. It kind of just tells the external flash: "Pls flash in 0,0123424532 seconds, KTHXBYE." And the external flash obeys, after all that's what you slaves have for.
So to state it even more clearly: In order to make a classical nice 1 strobe-through-1-umbrella-picture you just need a reasonably modern Nikon flash (SB-600/800/900), a middle class Nikon cam (eg. D90, alternatively add a SU-800 commander to the equation) and a light stand. Set the pop-up flash to master in menu e2 and there you go: You can control the power of the pop-up flash (I strongly suggest "--" for off) as well as the settings of the off-cam flash from the cam. How convenient is that!? It doesn't matter whether you use iTTL or manual mode, it's all there, on your camera display.
More about how to use the AWL/CLS, make sure to read Ken Rockwell's introduction. For a general introduction to off cam strobing is one great place in the Internet: Strobist.com.
P.S. Why use AWL and not cheap radio triggers? My killer argument is "FP" aka fast-sync: It facilitates to flash at much faster shutter speeds than 1/200s. The downside is still that you have to ensure that the light from the flash reaches the infrared sensor of the external flash at the side.
Update: As zhx points correctly out, there is some light spill from the pop-up flash. You can easily test it by shooting into a mirror. However if you keep some distance, there will be no visible traces of it in the exposure.
Today started with a 20 minute delay of my train so I went by the S-Bahn instead and got a pretty neat compensation. When I saw the golden mist, I just had to take my camera and take a picture.
I've got the Yong Nuo RF-602 remote flash trigger which happens also to be regular remote trigger, so I tried it out in the nice evening sunlight.
Now I seriously need to learn to strobe properly. :-/
I'm doing my very first steps with manual off-cam strobing. The fun part is that I haven't a remote trigger yet, so I use AWL and block off the pop-up strobe with my hand.
Not convenient, but it's lots of fun and I'm looking forward for my remote triggers. :)
Shot with one Nikon SB-600 @ 1/50 and 50mm through an umbrella, left and above the model.
And yeah, I guess this is my best shot so far.
