eBay Slaves

Yesterday I was pleased to find that the eBay trigger and slaves I'd ordered had arrived. This is actually quite impressive as I'd ordered them four days before and they had to travel from Hong Kong. I've had orders on eBay from the mainland take quite a bit more time.

The package was an unassuming brown envelope, rather smaller than I'd imagined. This rather pleased me because I was afraid they might be larger than would be strictly useful. I have the hot-shoe variety, not the cabled variety (though they can be used that way I gather). I took this image quickly with dreaded on-camera flash just to illustrate what I received. There a better image in an article on the DSLBlog about them. The item under the equipment is a homemade bounce diffuser I made with instructions linked on Strobist.com.

I unpacked the lot and spent a couple of minutes figuring out how to attach them to my D-80 and my SB-800. First the batteries went in and I managed not to break anything. The construction quality is about on a par with what you'd expect from inexpensive items such as these. I had no problems though.

It took a bit longer to figure out the setting on my camera. As it turns out, my trouble wasn't with the settings (I used manual), but in seating the slave on the SB-800. I hadn't completely attached the unit to the flash so no matter what settings I used the flash didn't fire, though the test lights on the trigger and slave suggested they were communicating. A couple of tries later I got it and found to my delight that both slaves worked fine and fired the flash as expected.

I don't have any images to show for all this yet though. I seem to be coming down with a bit of a cold so I've decided to take a break from all this and watch a movie or two today. The weather the last couple of days has been rainy off and on and as I ride a moped I get caught in it quite a lot. That hasn't helped this possible cold.

I did, however, go out last night and pick up a book on lighting for outdoor portraits. That's what I may be doing for that senior picture I mentioned previously. I'm not going to name the book because I'm not all that happy with it, but may change my mind with further reading. I also don't feel I'm a qualified judge of photography books. I will say I don't care for much of the work in it, though it does contain the sort of images I expect I'll be asked to create for this assignment. Some of the problems I note in the images have to do with the models' clothing distracting from the focus of the image. More on this topic can be found on Chuck Gardner's site and compositional tutorials. I highly recommend his site and especially his tutorials on "Concepts for Lighting and Still Photography."

Aloha!