TTL ‘Poverty Wizard’ Flash Triggers
Posted in: flash, Today's Chili
Flash photography with digital cameras is fantastic. Gone are the days of working out hard math in your head and then hoping that you’ll get your shots back from the lab with something near a correct exposure. And you could forget anything experimental unless you had time and money to burn. With an off camera flash and a digital camera, even if you are shooting fully manual all you need to do is look a the LCD and adjust. Easy, and fun.
And what’s even better is cordless, automatic flash. I long ago stopped using manual for anything but the weirdest of lighting, preferring aperture priority and quick tweaks to the exposure compensation dial. And with a modern DSLR, the camera will chirrup a few pre-flashes and communicate instructions to the remote strobe via further staccato IR blips. Exposure tweaks are done by you, from the camera itself, controlling an almost limitless number of speedlights.
The problem is line of site, and for the instructions to reach the flashes the camera needs to be able to “see” them. Enter the Pocket Wizard, a high-ticket set of RF remotes that can trigger your flashes via radio, increasing range and working around corners. The trouble is that even the Canon compatible versions have so far been both expensive and not worked so well with TTL auto.
Enter the Pixel remote, a sub-$200 (£100 or $165) set of triggers that beams the info from your Canon or Nikon camera to the flash over 2.4GHz radio (just like Wi-Fi) for up to 200 feet. One unit hooks up to the hot-shoe and to the camera’s PC socket, the other offers a shoe for the flash to slide into. Instead of taking the camera’s coded IR blips and converting them to RF and back again, the Pixel acts as a remote hot-shoe, with the flash and camera behaving as if they were actually joined together at the shoe.
The setup allows full i-TTL control for Nikon, and will be available for Canon in the New Year. The Chinese-made units have so far found a UK distributor (or rather, Ebayer), but should hopefully be coming to the US soon.
Pixel Product page [Pixel HK via Strobist]
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