The system that I purchased came with two flashes, two receivers and one transmitter. It also came with cases for each flash, mini stands, hard plastic diffusers, and cables to connect with the camera or into other light systems. I was pretty impressed with the set up, and it also had a full manual as well as a quick start guide.
Each flash appears to be fairly durable and the case that each comes in seems to offer the right amount of protection for the flashes. It also has Velcro straps so that you can attach them to your camera bag or even your belt depending on what you are doing. Each flash takes 4 AA batteries, and after a full 2 hour session of use the batteries are still working well. This is something that I must admit caused me to be surprised but at the same time I was excited as this means to me that I should not have to change out batteries every time that I turn around.
The flashes can be set up in a number of ways. You can attach them to the camera via the hot shoe, or attach the receivers and use them as off camera flash. When setting up the flashes you have multiple options. You can use the slave mode, manual mode, or strobe. Within these settings you can control certain aspects, such as ISO, and shutter speed.
These flashes DO NOT transmit any information from the camera. The only time that this happens is if the flash is connected directly to the hot shoe of the camera. The transmitter and receivers work off of a radio frequency and thus do not carry any kind of information.
When I used the set up I opted to fire both flashes off camera and use the transmitter to trigger both the camera (a Nikon D7100) and the flash with a secondary flash in slave mode. This is where the trouble began. I set everything up per the manual and was unable to get the flashes to trigger with the camera. I eventually changed the transmitter on the flash to camera, versus flash, and than was able to get the flash to fire. The second problem I discovered was triggering the second flash. In order to fire the second flash it has to be in very close proximity in order to to sense the first flash firing. This was troubling to me because I felt that I almost had to point the first flash at the second to get the desired result, which took away the light from my subject. The third problem I discovered was a syncing issue. I could not get the flashes to fire at the right time. They would not sync with the camera. Even after watching multiple YouTube videos I could just not get it to work properly. The flashes were consistently firing before my shutter was even beginning to move.
After doing some research I discovered that I am not the only one that has had this problem. I looked in several forums and discovered that there were a number of suggestions as to why it wouldn't sync, with the D7100 and there was even a suggestion to try it with another D7100 camera. This was done, and ended with the same result. The flash system would not sync.
At the current time I have not been able to figure out a solution for this particular issue.
Over all I think that this can be a great system, if you can get it to work with your camera. I also think it is a great system for a beginner. However this is not a system that I would be comfortable taking into a situation that I would not be able to recreate if for some reason the system failed. With this in mind I would NOT use this system for event photography, or weddings. I think that this system would be alright for things such as portrait sessions and head shots due to the fact that these are things that can be recreated at another time on the chance that there is a failure.
0 comments:
Post a Comment