Pass Right On Through With The New Pocket Wizard IV

Transmitters and receivers for sending signals between cameras and flash units have been legion in the last few years, but few of them have combined all of the features that people wanted - now PocketWizard have released their new Plus IV and it looks as though it redresses the situation.

What it provides:

Radio-frequency command between your camera and your flash out to a long distance.

TTL through-put to a flash mounted on the camera - in other words you can send out a manual signal to outboard units while your TTL flash on camera does the usual measuring and quenching thing.

                                               

   

Control  for 4 separate flash groups.

Control for 32 channels.

Note that you get an orange back-lit panel when you press the Mode button. When you are using flash in dimly-lit venues any on-board illumination is a blessing. Rocket Wizard have decades of experience in the field.

Auto sensing for pairing the transmitter and receiver.

Two-stage remote camera triggering. Just like the shutter button on your camera - half and full-press and then turns off to save battery power.

Receiver will accept and fire up to 14.5 FPS.

Runs on 2 x standard AA batteries or you can put external power in through a Mini-USB port on the PocketWizard IV.

And best of all - they have lain the body of the thing down forward instead of making it stick up like their old units. Much easier to move about with the camera if it lies along the top of the lens. Note that they have been wise enough to make the battery door a hinged fair rather than a slide-off cover that would be lost and trampled on.

 

1/4" screw socket on the bottom and TTL hot shoe on the top. A stand-alone independent outfit.

Find it online or in-store!

Letter To The Camera Designers - The Wireless Trigger

Dear Camera Designers,

Thank you for the new features on my camera. I appreciate the Automatic setting, the Intelligent Automatic setting, and the Disturbingly Prescient setting. Last night my camera got out of its bag, went down the street, and took a picture of the showers at the Nurse's Quarters all by itself. Tonight I am deadlocking the door.

Thank you also for the smile recognition feature, though I must admit that mine seems to have died - I turned it on at it to the last family picnic and the camera refused to fire.

The little pictogram in the special settings menu is my favourite - the one that has the cocktail glass. I look at it fondly every afternoon about 5:00. I feel you have come to understand me.

Now that we have these ideas realised, I would like to suggest a further improvement in your design - the provision of a small and effective wireless flash trigger in the accessory battery grips of your DSLR and mirrorless cameras.

Already one manufacturer has pursued this in red-and-white terms for one model of their DSLR. They have provided a wireless link to their high-end speed light - thus leapfrogging aftermarket units stuck onto the top of the hit shoe. I would like all of you to consider the next step - come to an industry agreement with one of the professional flash system manufacturers: Bow---s, Elin----m, Pro---o, or whoever - and put a transmitter for their STUDIO flash into a handgrip that bolts under the camera.

This is a good place - you can combine it with a spare battery if there is enough room, but if not you can at least link it to a shutter button and fire the studio strobes in synch - without having a big 'ol box and a rubber antenna waggling away on top of the pentaprism. Doesn't have to broadcast far in a studio and shouldn't take more power than a wifi connection.

Come to think of it...would a little firmware fiddling with the wifi do it? If there was a receiver module that you could plug into the studio strobe dedicated to your camera's wifi signal and just go with that? Wish I knew...but as camera designers and masters of electronics, I am sure you will consider it favourably.

Yours sincerely,

 Uncle Dick

Getting A Good Signal - Flash Triggers For Right Now

I'm proud to say that I was using a radio-link flash trigger in my studio 20 years ago. Prior to that I was using a black cable strung between the Elinchrom lights and the camera stand - I was using it to clothesline myself in the dark.

I never managed to pull over an entire light or camera stand with this but I did manage to wrench a PC socket loose from a DSLR. There was language...

The radio link I purchased to prevent this sort of thing happening is fairly big and crude. It takes two different sets of batteries and is large enough to obscure the shutter speed dial of my mirror-less camera when plugged onto the hot shoe. Last Sunday it served me notice that the time had come to think of a new one. The sequence of events was interesting - see if this sort of thing happens to you - you might be in the same boat as I.

Shooting away... after about 15 minutes, the shutter fired but the flash didn't. The open flash button on the radio sender lit up but nothing else happened. Then it would come good for a couple of shots.

Then one shot came along had a perfectly exposed top with a dark black bottom, and the following shot had even more dark further up the frame. Finally one frame was entirely black, even though the flash had fired...

At this point of time I had to wonder if the camera synch had packed up. I wound back the shutter speed to 1/4 second, fired, and got good exposure. Advancing up the shutter speeds toward the nominal top synch speed of 1/180 sec was fine until I got to 1/180 - the blackness crept back... to a different extent.

Out with the hot-shoe block and the dreaded old wire synch cord. Everything synched perfectly from 1 sec on up to 1/180 sec as per normal. The conclusion I drew is that the twenty-year old radio trigger set is developing intermittent flaws in both timing and contact. It is time to look at a Pocketwizard, Promaster, Hahnel, or Elinchrom radio trigger set. They work pretty well, and are a darn sight smaller than the current devices.

I don't think I could face the PC cord again. Not with my face...

Heath Robinson vs Rube Goldberg

Or how I learned to love photography.

Old photographers will remember the sorts of things that we did in the darkroom to produce the special effects. Weeks spent gathering equipment, chemicals, containers, tanks, agitators...months spent sealing the space against the ingress of light - while letting the most aggressive of the poisonous fumes escape...hours spent trying to get the negatives to register accurately in the gate of the enlarger or he paper to register accurately on the easel. Then the clean up afterwards. Scrubbing the stains out of the bathtub before the wife discovers them...

Now we just download a plug-in app and click the mouse. All over in a second and no scrubbing. All the fun has evaporated.

Well, no, it hasn't. Not by a long way. We now have the wireless link and the WiFi and the iPhone  and the hot spot and all the other horrors of modern electronics. In the interests of saving the lives of copper miners by reducing the amount of cables that are needed, I have prepared a plan for the best selfie ever.

1. PocketWizard transmitter in pocket firing a...

2. Camera with a transmitter firing...

3. Several speedlights wirelessly, in full TTL, with frosting and sprinkles, while the camera is...

4. Recording the image on the WiFi card that sends the image off to the computer that...

5. Sends the image automatically to Facebook, Twitter, and Google who then pass it on to...

6. ASIO, NSA, the FBI, the KGB, Mossad, M.I.5, and Julian Assange while simultaneously...

7. Sending it to the Epson 3000 printer that whirs away while...

8. It goes to the cloud where it then rains down on your iPad, and iPhone.

All this within a fraction of a second. No smells, no stains. The bathtub is pristine. Your bank account has a hole in it but that is the price of progress. Cheer up - with on-line banking you don't even have to go to the local branch. You can stay at home and press the shutter release a second time.

The first shot will cost you $ 8900 but the second brings it down to $ 4450... a snip!

Fear Of Flash

I learned two things over the weekend shooting - three if you count my continuing experiments in the studio.


First thing - People are frightened of flash. No, not just the persons who have been struck by lightning - novice photographers who go out to see stage events and hope to capture the colour and action with their DSLRs. They shoot away, look at the screen, puzzle at the dark images, boost the ISO, and shoot again. When they get the images back home they are still puzzled at the dark shadows but now they have an accompanying pattern of coloured dots in them. At this point some might become discouraged...and some might become Eduard Seurat...but there is a better technical answer.

Flash.

Not Gordon, either - I mean flash on, and off your camera. Most of the modern DSLRs have provision for a dedicated flash unit as well as the in-built pop-up. The hot shoe has a pattern of  computer contacts on the upper surface as well as a central firing contact. These pass information to and from the flash unit attached thereto, and the computer in the flash talks to the computer in the camera. Quite what they say between themselves about the operator is another matter, but at least there is agreement.

If you ask them to work in a TTL mode the flash will give a little pop to show the camera what the subject looks like, the camera will compare this to the overall light level that it can see, and then give the flash good advice as to how much more light to pop out for the main exposure. All within the time that the shutter is open. The result in most cases is a pretty good balance of exposure. Some subjects can jigger up the equation but then you can recover this later.

Main thing is where do you want to light to come from and what do you want it to see? Leading on to the second thing - Get that light up high and let it look down on the subjects. I shot belly dancers on Saturday night and the old problem of how to get enough light to the back line without blowing the sequins off the front line girls is easy to solve if you put your flash onto a Manfrotto monopod head and hoist it up on a Manfrotto light stand and let it see the the whole stage from up near the ceiling.

How do you trigger the flash up there? I used a 10 mtr coiled TTL cord running down to the hot shoe on the camera. ( Worked fine, which answers the question whether something that length will transmit TTL data.) If I had chosen to do so, I could have used a wireless radio control system from Pocket Wizard, or Hahnel. I could have set the on-board flash on my Nikon D300 to control the SB 700 flash by an infra-red link, but I wanted to try that coiled cord. Had I used a new Canon camera and new Canon flash I could have had in-built radio TTL....but then I would have had to buy all new lenses and a red bow tie as well...

Point is, that flash let me work at ISO 400 where my camera is comfortable, all the faces got light, and all the colour is real. I have had long experience of Perth stage lighting and unless Michael Edgely is plugging in the lamps and paying for the electricity, things can be pretty drab. Plus stage lighting colour is the opinion of the person setting the gels, and this may be entirely different from either mine or the dancer who has sewn her costume.

There was no mathematics involved. I changed the flashes for their mates at the 100 shot mark to let the batteries cool and the evening went swimmingly. I do not need to fight the computer at home to get good colour and none of the dancers will chase me up the street with scimitars.

Oh, that third discovery in the studio? Next blog.

How To Get That Synching Feeling

It used to be all about how to prevent that sinking feeling - see the Bovril advertisements. Just the opposite today, when we want to control a battery of flashes without stringing a spider web of cables. We've just had a shipment of the new PocketWizard Plus III transceivers arrive -some for our rental department and some for stock sales.

These are the model that has 32 separate channels if needed and can independently control 4 groups of flashes for complex lighting set ups. They are slim, robust, and best of all...powered by standard AA batteries. There is even a battery state icon visible on the LCD screen to let you know whether you've got enough juice for the shoot.

Not expensive for professional performance - $ 179. Stop in and get a pair before your next shoot.

Just Arrived on Platform One

As promised a few weeks ago - the first shipment of the new Pocket Wizard III transceivers has arrived at the station. These are smaller, lighter, more configurable, and more convenient that previous flash triggers. 4 groups  that you can control and 32 channels of transmission - you never need clash with other professionals on a shoot. Still the same AA power supply and brass tripod socket on the side, too.

This is bound to become the new standard for radio-frequency speed light control. It is adaptable to all flashes- little pocket types up to full studio units - and the weight on the hot shoe of your camera is negligible. Not an unimportant factor in along day's shooting - ask any wedding pro how heavy their gear is about 9:30 in the evening and you would be surprised at the language.

Come in quick - we've got 5 of the transceivers in today - that's 2 and a half complete outfits - and they will fly out the door. $ 179.

PocketWizard Plus III

We're just about to take delivery of the new PocketWizard Plus III radio transceivers. Those of you who have used the PW Plus II and the PW MultiMAX know that they are the very flexible and reliable. The PW III adds new features to extend this even further. Of course they are reverse-compatible with these other two fine products.

The 32 channels of the MultiMax have been retained and the photographer can now trigger 4 independent zones from one position, turning groups of lights on and off. The range of the units can be increased readily with the Long Range option and even further with the ability of the units to combine and relay a signal.

The units are very clever, being able to distinguish whether they are expected to be transmitters or receivers at any one time. Indeed, if you wish to give  remote camera firing instructions , the PW Plus III on it will do so but then automatically shift up one frequency to pass on the command to a remote flash unit.

The units have a two-stage trigger so that the normal operations of auto-focusing and auto-exposure sensing may take place and then a further pressure will fire the camera. If you are shooting a motor drive camera ( do we still call them that?) it can cycle at 14.5 frames per second.

Best of all the casing for the PW Plus III has a back-lit LCD screen on the side of the unit - the profile the photographer sees has been slimmed down.

We'll blog you when they arrive.

A Wizard Idea - PocketWizard That Is.

There is a large pile of Pocket Wizard boxes here in the store room with a pair of legs protruding out from under them. It is obvious what has happened – a new shipment of these flash control accessories has come in, been stacked too high, and toppled over on the storeman. Fortunately there has been no damage to the Pocket Wizards – they are tough and durable – but there is a lot of bad language coming from under the pile.

Help us out here – come down and purchase a set of Plus II’s, or TTL Mini or Flex 5, or the AC3 controllers. You can get Nikon or Canon fitting. If we can sell enough before Christmas we can dig out the storeman and let him go on holiday.

Pocket Wizard Firmware Update

Wireless flash control company PocketWizard has updated the firmware of its ControlTL system for both Canon and Nikon products. The update works in the MiniTT1 and FlexTT5 radios for both systems. The upgrade adds features such as Hypersync Automation, which attempts to adjust the timing of flash firing in response to shutter speed changes to maximise the sync speed. There is also a Speedcycler mode that, when used with an AC3 Zonecontroller, fires groups of flashes sequentially so that one group is always ready when shooting bursts of images.

So. Burlington, VT – September 1, 2011 – PocketWizard, the industry leader in wireless control and synchronization of cameras, flash and light meters, announces a major new update to its ControlTL firmware for both Nikon and Canon versions of its MiniTT1 and FlexTT5 radios. Available now, version 3.0 for Nikon and Version 6.0 for Canon include several new features and updates to make the system more powerful than ever including HyperSync™ Automation, SpeedCycler and Off Camera Power Control.  Any current owner of the ControlTL system can install these new features and updates for free using the PocketWizard Utility.

“We’re excited about these new features for the ControlTL system and the creative potential they represent for photographers,” said Dave Schmidt, Vice President of Marketing at LPA Design, the company that manufacturers PocketWizard photo products. “Firmware upgrades such as this are a benefit for photographers who invest in PocketWizard radios. HyperSync Automation will be a game changer in that it opens up the amazing capability to use blazing fast sync speeds with flash units – creating amazing potential in sports or portrait applications.”

For more information on how to update visit: http://www.pocketwizard.com/support/downloads/