Flash: Triggers and Syncing

MDalby

I have a shoot I am preparing for that I will be using 4 flashes, (2) White Lightning 1800s in Front and (2) Nikon SB-800 Speedlights in back.

I have only used my Speedlight flashes as totally remote and used my Radio Poppers for triggers or used my two Speedlights together, one as a master and one as a slave. I have not used my White Lightnings yet.

I currently only have two Radio Popper receivers. How should I set things up for this shoot? Run sync cables to the White Lightnings and have one trigger to set off the WL flashes and use one RadioPopper for one of the Nikon flashes and have the other as a slave?

Thanks in advance for the help.

MD

Art Scott

the White Lightnings have a built in optical slave that will fire the in time (synced) with the SB800's, unless it is an outdoors shoot in bright daylight.......if it is indoors should be absolutely no problem.....I do not know the sb800's ....but from your description I would set one as slave and use a radio popper to fire the other one, they in turn should fire the WL's............................

MDalby

Art Scott wrote: »

the White Lightnings have a built in optical slave that will fire the in time (synced) with the SB800's, unless it is an outdoors shoot in bright daylight.......if it is indoors should be absolutely no problem.....I do not know the sb800's ....but from your description I would set one as slave and use a radio popper to fire the other one, they in turn should fire the WL's............................

Awesome.

Thanks Art!

Art Scott

My Pleasure..............

Sam

As Art said the WL have an optical slave that will fire the flashes. One thing to be aware of is depending on the ambient light at the location, the placement sb800 and direction the WL are facing it's possible the WL won't see the sb800 flash pulse.

There are are a few ways to fix this. First try using a reflector or white foam core to bounce the sb800's lights to the rear of the WL. Or try lowering the ambient light, or both.

Also I don't know how the Nikon speedlites work, but with the Canon lights if you try to trigger one OCF with another OCF connected to a radio transmitter it won't work. OK the second OCF will flash but with a huge delay. The delay is about a 1/2 second or more. Not usable. So using Canon speedlites I would need two receivers or have one speedlite on camera and use the built in Canon wirerless system.

Sam

time2smile

Use your D700 as the master, 2 SB800 as slaves, this will give you full ittl control.

The other flashes have optical slaves, as everyone posted, they should fire unless you have alot of ambient light.

Hers is some reading

http://www.nikondigital.org/articles/cls_vanhoose/index.htm

http://nikonclspracticalguide.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-to-shoot-large-groups-with-nikon.html

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/02/welcome-to-strobist.html

Art Scott

time2smile wrote: »

Use your D700 as the master, 2 SB800 as slaves, this will give you full ittl control.

The other flashes have optical slaves, as everyone posted, they should fire unless you have alot of ambient light.

The problem here comes from the PRE - flashes that do the measuring for the ttl...that will fire the WL's and then you get bad exposures from the spreed lights that are being used as background lights......the WL's should pick up the flash from the SB's from the front side back........with this type of set up the best thing to do is to shoot in total manual mode...........but that is how I shoot especially with any studio flash set up......

time2smile

Art, could he not do a manual pre-flash, this way it will meter all flashes correctly.

Art Scott

time2smile wrote: »

Art, could he not do a manual pre-flash, this way it will meter all flashes correctly.

I do not know if that is even possible, that is why I still shoot with a meter in hand.....I do not know of a way to get it to burst to measure the studio flashes also......then again I just do not like leaving everything up to a computer that was totally programmed by someone else.....

time2smile

FV Lock will fire the flashes, all SB slaves and optic. On my D90, i assign the function button to FV, The camera will then meter that flash, and not fire a pre-flash until you reset. I cant remember if the meter shuts off, will it reset. Easily tried. i just tried it and it does reset when the meter shuts off, you will need to lengthen the meter time.

Art Scott

time2smile wrote: »

FV Lock will fire the flashes, all SB slaves and optic. On my D90, i assign the function button to FV, The camera will then meter that flash, and not fire a pre-flash until you reset. I cant remember if the meter shuts off, will it reset. Easily tried. i just tried it and it does reset when the meter shuts off, you will need to lengthen the meter time.

...what type of studio flash was involved in this trial??
What do you mean by lengthen the meter time??

time2smile

Art Scott wrote: »

...what type of studio flash was involved in this trial??
What do you mean by lengthen the meter time??

I just use speedlights, I have a SB700, 2 SB600, and 3 Quantaray full auto speedlights. I use the RF602'S to fire the 3 while i master/slave the SB's. I use a sync adapt to trigger the RF602 transmitter, mounted on the camera, with the SB700 on top of it. The adapter gives me full ittl and a standard sync pulse.

The time that the camera meter stays on in the viewfinder, if it shuts off the FV lock disables, and you have to fire the FV again, could be a real pain, my first attempts at this was with a couple of old single battery flash units, took like 6 sec to recharge.