Q&A: Triggering off-camera flash

It’s great to get feedback on the blog, and that comes to me in three ways – comments on individual posts, emails through the website, or tweets on Twitter.   I try to respond to all feedback as much as possible, and I do read everything that comes my way.  Yesterday I received an email from Paul, a Dublin-based reader who asked a question which was in a similar vein to one I was asked last night at Dublin Camera Club, so I thought I’d respond to it as a blog post.  Read on for the question and my answer.

So Paul writes:

Hi Ronan,
I love the recent photo of Fiona’s wedding.  I cannot get my SB600 and SB00 to work with my recently purchsed Elinchrom transmitter and receivers  What is the set up using a Nikon D300 (Manual on camera and ?? on flash units?)
Paul

The photo he is referring to is this first dance shot of Fiona and John, taken at their wedding in Sneem last August.  I’ve illustrated this Q&A with another first dance shot, taken with the same lighting setup.  To recap on that previous post, the setup is two speedlights, an SB-800 and an SB-600, at two adjacent corners of the dance floor, so that in the photo above one is behind John’s head, and the other is at back camera left, throwing a highlight on John’s face (you can get an idea where this light is from the shadows of the people sitting down at the far right of the frame).  I triggered both flashes using the pop-up flash on the D300, but did consider triggering them using Elinchrom Skyport wireless triggers.  The reason I didn’t do so is the answer to Paul’s question.

Let’s go back to the beginning.  To trigger a flash you have to connect it to the camera somehow.  If you have a compact camera with a flash built in, this is easy – it’s connected permanently, and you just turn it on (or off).  If you have a speedlight, chances are your camera has a hot-shoe, and the easiest (though not necessarily the best for good lighting) way to connect the two is to mount the flash on the camera in the hot shoe.

Ok, that’s fairly straight forward.  For better lighting (amongst other reasons) you might want to take the speedlight off the camera.  Now you have two options for maintaining the connection to the camera. You can connect it with a wire, or you can connect it wirelessly.

Let’s look at the wired options.  If you have a Nikon camera and a Nikon flash, you could by a Nikon TTL cord, which will connect the two and allow you move the flash off the camera by a limited amount (maybe 3 feet?).  Enough to dramatically improve your lighting, but still limiting.  The benefit of a TTL cord is that it connects all the signals that travel between the camera and the flash, so your fancy expensive speedlight is as useful as if it was sitting on the camera.  You can use all the automatic modes, and let the camera and flash meter for you.  Good stuff.  But TTL cords are expensive.  And short.  And you may not want to use your flash in automatic (iTTL/eTTL mode).   Note here where I refer to Nikon here, generally (an exception later on) the same applies to Canon, Sony and other brands.

The other wired option is a PC sync cord. These are cheaper and longer. But they’re less intelligent.  They can only tell your flash to fire.  Not how long to fire for, or how much power to use.  Just a binary fire/don’t fire type of signal.  It means you, as photographer, have to tell the flash some extra information.  Your flash is only useful in Manual mode.

The wireless options are similar.  You can use the fancy automatic modes with a fancy wireless system – Nikon users may get this for free with CLS (which is what I used here, and that allows you to let the camera and flash do the work in metering etc, or it allows you shoot manually but control the flashes from the camera – again, what I did here).  It’s limited again though in that it needs line of sight, and works much better indoors that outside.  You can get a more expensive fancy wireless system (soon) from Radiopopper or Pocketwizard, who are both developing wireless triggers that work exactly like that TTL cord, and maintain all communications between your camera and the flashes, but with a huge range.  In the world of off-camera flash, these will be the ultimate triggers. But they’re expensive, and not readily available on this side of the Atlantic yet.

The other wireless option, analagous to the PC cord, is to use a “dumb” wireless trigger – these aren’t necessarily cheap, though they can be if you get some on ebay that will fire semi-reliably, but they are still only capable of binary flash/no-flash signalling, without any of the other communications that TTL flash requires.  So if you’re using these triggers, your flash needs to be in Manual mode, and you’ll not only have to set power and zoom yourself, but you’ll also have to set these on the flash rather than from the camera.  The Elinchrom Skyports that Paul refers to, and that I considered using, fall into this category.

Note there is a hybrid coming to the market from both Radiopopper and Pocketwizard, which have the functionality of these “dumb” triggers, but allow you manually control the flash from the camera – an interesting proposition indeed if you are comfortable with manual flash, as they are likely to be much cheaper than the fancy-pants solution from both companies, but more convenient that other dumb triggers, and very reliable.

So to summarize, and to answer your question Paul, because the Skyports are just effectively a wireless PC cord, you’ll need to put your flash in Manual mode, and adjust the power using the controls on the back of the flash unit.  Note that you can have your camera in any mode you like – aperture priority, shutter priority or programme for instance, but remember that it will meter only the ambient light, and won’t be able to meter for the flash also.  A good way to meter with this setup is to decide how you want your ambient light, meter for that, and then adjust the flash power until your subject looks good.  That, in a sentence, sums up what can take a long time to understand, and is a topic for another day.  For now though, put your flashes in manual mode and you should be able to get them to trigger off the camera (assuming you have the right cables to connect the receivers to the flashes, which I assume you do!)