Hi all, i am posting this to help out the people who are interested in off-shoe flash.

I whipped this up tonight giving you some pics and some info about basic stuff like ebay triggers and so on.

ask any lighting questions here and if i can answer them i will

ok lets get into it.....



1.

This is your basic bracket. It come form http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ and cost around $15au.



It has two screw thumbs on each end to put over the head of the light stand and one for the flash shoe or cold shoe which you flash will sit in.






It also has a hole with a thumb screw to hold an umbrella in place.



2

Ok this is your basic setup. A flash (430ex) mounted on a bracket on a light stand. Now this setup would be used if you had an ST-E2 transmitter, which is a infra-red transmitter that you place on your cameras hot-shoe and it will transmit via infra-red to the flash.



3

Now heres an ebay flash trigger setup (the advertised way of doing it). You place your flash on top of the receiver and then the receiver on your tripod or light stand head or bracket whatever pleases you. I do not recommend this for as the receivers adjustable foot is flimsy as all sh*t. If your outside and it gets windy and you get some sway happening it might snap and your flash comes falling to the ground (not good). Another scenario could be if someone bumped your light stand same thing could happen.








Heres how to fix it. Now im using one of my Nikon flashes as the flash models i have all have a pc sync which i will talk about soon. To fix this problem you can, IF your flash has some sort of sync port you can run a cord from you flash to your receivers pc sync jack. Some manual flashes like the Vivitar 285hv come with this cord. so all you do is buy your ebay tiggers and plug everything together put your transmitter on your hot-shoe and away you go. So to fix the problem you run your cord form receiver to flash and that way your flash hot-shoe is free, so all you do is mount your flash onto the brackets cold shoe, tighten the thumb screw and bango your done . The pc sync jack can be found on some camera bodies like the 30d and others. It allows you to plug basically any cord the runs to a studio strobe or camera flash.










4


Another way to trigger your flashes is via Optical Slave. With optical slaves work via light, (i cant explain for sh*t) you have to have another flash firing for the optical slave to pick up that light and fire the flash on top of it. So you could have a speedlite mounted on your hot-shoe firing and then the optical slave would fire at the same time. I dont reccomend this as other people can fire you flashes as much as they want and it does not work very well outdoors. Also if your using your cameras on board flash it has a preflash this is will pop your flash with an optical slave attached so when you buy one make sure you get one that ignores the preflash if you intend to do it this way.






5

Gobo- A gobo is a flat piece of anything you want that you stick or velcro to a side of your flash to flag off unwanted light from say a backdrop or when you are using flash behind a model as rim light you dont get lens flare. I made mine with cardboard and velcro and some balck paint which is coming off






6

Snoot- A snoot is a round piece of anything you want which you wrap around your flash head to to direct light and keep control on any light you dont want. It is a BIG help when shooting product shots or small things. I made mine with some plastic thing i ripped out of a school book, i placed some velcro on it to stick it to my flash head and it works like a charm.



7

Gels- Another reason for all the velcro on my flash heads is for gels. I use Rosco Gels which cost me all of $0.01us (they go really quick so most of the time bh are out of stock, i bought like 50 of these and distributed them to a friend. I have so many that i dont use. You place them infront of your flash and you get cool colour effects and more importantly use them for colour correction with white balance issues.





And thats about it for now, ill post up some more stuff another time. Hope it helps and please ask any lighting questions in here, and questions about gear. let me know what you think.


oh and heres a setup shot




Tyson

you're a legend, this is going to help so many people. I can't believe those gels are 1 cent!

i have mine a lil dif but great tut man ur awesome !@!@

cheers chris and dave,

dave do you use speedlite on master and one on slave and so on?

thank you very much for you help today and for this tutorial

i bought all that stuff i spoke to you about...ahhh its fun spending money on camera stuff lol

wait till you start buying the l series lenses

hahaha, my house saving fund is going to go down then lol

great tut. Never really thought too much about lighting kits but anything i have thought of was answered as well.

A++ GREAT, WILL BUY FROM AGAIN

i wont put that for the people i bought my rf triggers off.. bastards..

Have any examples of each type of setup, just to see what the end result looks like using each example (gel, gobo, etc)?

Can't you imagine a coloured gel in front of the flash causing it to flash green/red/whatever instead of white?

Same goes for a gobo and snoot, snoots just shoot a focused beam of light rather than a broad spread and a gobo just helps stop flare and helps stop light an area you don't want to get lit.

You didn't mention cookies Tyson, although personally I don't think a lot of people would really use cookies (apart from say roman blinds in that cliche bedroom shot etc etc)

call me stupid but i cant find those brackets on bhphoto

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/2987...la_Bracket.html

cheers for that, i was looking everywhere under flashes lol

great info. cheers.

i currently have a canon 40d and 430ex
would you suggest the ST-E2 transmitter if i was going to
buy another 430 or would you get pocket wizards??

I wouldn't go ST-E2 unless you want TTL, and even then it only works in line-of-site. There's a couple other things you could try before you go spending $400ea on PW's. $50 ebay V2s kit. Sure it's cheap but you'll soon know if strobing is something you want to continue with rather than spending $1500 and then realising it's not really your cup of tea. Skyports are decent little jiggers, no TTL, basic triggers but have a good range over the V2s. Radiopoppers are bringing out a new line that sports TTL and it's radio so your flash could be say, behind you, above you on the wall stuck with a manfrotto cup or something and it'd still work, or hiding around from you, out of sight and would still work (radio vs light see?) but then of course you have your PW's, which to me are very expensive but feature-rich. BTW the new Radiopoppers are said to equal the max distance (1600m line of sight) and be smaller.

Thee's some stuff to think about and research anyway!

thanks heaps

radio poppers are brining out a jrx unit.. which has no gay ttl stuff. its gunna be cheap as.. reach as far if not further than pw's and be nice and small. will be about 8 weeks

And they have a model with TTL as well don't they?

Cheap-as = same price at the Elinchom's yeh?

Yeh the ttl models have been released but not too aus. No they jrx will be either 75 or 50 us

Nice!!

extremely nice bout 250 aus for trans and 2 receivers at the recent poo exchange rate

http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2034