Off Camera Flash And the Event Photographer

I have never quite decided what an event photographer is. Or what an event photographer does.

An infantry assault over open ground in the face of machine guns is an event - likewise a wedding is an event, similar to the infantry assault, but with the officers up at the front...and generally at a wedding the machine gun fields of fire overlap more...

So what does an event photographer need - besides nerve, a camera, and a hip flask? Well they either need a long lens to stay out of the way or a short lens and a flash to get in amongst it. Those of you given to fits of horror at the thought of flash may be excused - you are artists and we make allowance for you. The rest of you need to see what is actually going on.

Nearly every serious camera has some form of hot-shoe connection on it. This can be the place to put your flash if you want the light to blast straight forward. Good for police mug shots but a bit limiting for some other subjects. That hot-shoe connection is a useful place, however, to base a wireless control for your flash - and then you are as free as the air to place it anywhere that helps.

Hahnel, Promaster, Yongnuo, Pocket Wizard, and a dozen other small manufacturers make wireless flash triggers that do the job. The expensive versions have TTL connection between the flash and the camera while the economical models just send a "fire now" signal to the flash gun and you have to do all the power setting on the flash yourself.

This is not onerous on some flashes - you can lock Nikon, Fujifilm, or Canon flashes into "manual" mode and then use the button or dial control on the flash to go from 1/1 power down to 1/64 power. You get a quick feedback from the LCD screen and soon recognise how much power you need.

The greatest joy of this unleashed approach is that you can operate a light camera with one hand and then hold the flash in peculiar and particular positions to punch light into the scene. You can even abandon it to point in out of reach - as long as you can prop up the rig.
No-end of scenes benefit from fill flash - in some cases even to the extent that the fill becomes the dominant light.

If you free yourself from the top of the camera you can light anything!

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

Yongnuo Duo Fire Flash Fast

No, I didn't just replace the colour in Photoshop Elements - though I could have... The Yongnuo people have colour-coded their transceiver set packs for either Nikon or Canon users.

In either case they work effectively with the respective TTL flash systems for these camera types. They provide 7 channels in 3 groups - can throw out AF lights to help focus - and can do high speed synch. Of course you can always switch to manual control as well.

You'll not on the packet that it shows a separate PC connector socket at the side of the transceiver - this is very useful if you are also triggering off studio flashes or older -odder - units. As with many of these control boxes, the more options you have the more useful it is - there are all sorts of things that we think up later on in using external flashes, and the less adapters and blocks you need the better. It gets to look like Heath Robinson as it is.