Updated guide to off-camera flash gear

A few years back I made up a bit of a guide for what you need if you're wanting to start shooting with off-camera flash. Since then new products have came out and prices have changed etc. Recently I was writing up an email to a friend who was facing the same situation, getting started with off-camera flash, and as the email started reaching into novella territory I decided I'd also share the info via a blog post.

I'm not going to go into the specifics of what all of the products do, refer back to my older article here if you want that info.

The main things you'll need are Speedlights (aka the external flashes that mount on your camera), a method of triggering them, stands to hold them, umbrellas or some other light modifier to make the light softer, an umbrella swivel to attach the light modifier to a light stand.

All of this can be purchased for under $250

A quick note about where most of these links go to, a site called DX.com formerly dealextreme.com
I'm in no way affiliated with this company and don't receive any kickbacks or anything for promoting them. Though in hindsight I damn well should lol, I buy way too much from them and have turned dozens of people on to their site :) A quick note about ordering from them, they offer free shipping but it takes awhile. In Canada I'd say bank on 1 month between ordering and receiving your package give or take a week, sometimes items are back-ordered and can take longer.

Flash/Speedlights
The first flash I bought was the Canon 580EXII and paid around $600 for it, in hindsight this was one of the biggest wastes of money I've ever made in my photography career. All of the automated ETTL bells and whistles that adjust the flash power automatically are only needed if you're shooting on the fly like a journalist or paparazzi. For posed photography all you need is manual control, which can be had for much much less.

Yong Nuo 460 Mark II $45each (I recommend buying 2)
Best bang for your buck EVER! Decent amount of flash power, built in optical slave, manual control. I have 6 of these :) Also they have plenty of room inside if you want to mod it and add a 1/8th jack.

Yong Nuo 565EX 2.0 $150
If you think you'll really need the automated stuff (ie Canon's ETTL) check out the YN565 (note this is a Canon only model) as a budget alternative to the real Canon 580EXII. I haven't used this myself but the reviews are favourable. I'm pretty sure they make versions for each of the major camera manufacturers like Canon/Nikon/Sony.

Wireless Triggers:
There are now a wide range of budget triggers on the market, I'll recommend 3 different ones and for different reasons. Pocket Wizards are still the "gold standard" in the industry but I simply could never justify the purchase when I could buy multiple sets of budget triggers for the price of 1 PW transceiver and have never had any reliability issues with the budget ones.

PT-04 (~$20 for 1tx 1rx)
These were the first triggers I bought, at ~$20 for a transmitter/receiver pair I wound up buying 4 sets eventually just for redundancy. I also modded them to accept a 1/8th stereo jack to go along with my modded Yong Nuo 460 flashes above. These are sold under a whole host of different names like Jiansi, Fotga, and recently Blazzeo. The only con is that the transmitter takes a more obscure CR2 battery, but these can be found on the dealextreme website for ~$5 for a 5 pack. Here is a link to the triggers on DX but check ebay too, the ones I got were from ebay and had a PC sync socket on the side which is a nice addition. Another con with these triggers is that the receiver is situated vertically so if installed in a hotshoe and a flash is placed on top it is very unbalanced (which is why I modded mine to accept 1/8 jacks).

Yong Nuo RF-602 triggers
I have not used these but have heard about them on various forums etc, I think they could possibly be the same circuit or design at least as the PT-04's but with the advantage of fitting horizontally when installed on a light stand. For these I recommend checking ebay for a set that has 1 transmitter and at least 2 receivers (at time of writing a bundle like this is ~$42). DX does sell them but only in pairs with 1 transmitter and 1 receiver. Like the PT-04's you'll need these CR2 batteries for the transmitter.

Cactus V5's
For a little more money you can get a bit of a more reputable name with the Cactus V5 triggers sold at gadget infinity. Each of these have the ability to function as a transmitter or receiver, extra cables can be purchased to fit a whole host of cameras (Canon/Nikon/Sony/Olympus/Panasonic) so that they can be used as remote shutter releases. Note that these cables are not required if simply using them as flash triggers.

Light Stands ~$75 for 2
Again its ebay to the rescue, because of this I don't really want to link to a listing that will be outdated right away. These range in price and quality, on average though I found sets of 2 on ebay that were listed for a total of $75 with shipping included (often the item was less than the shipping price but that's a common ebay trick anyway). Check your local camera shop just to be safe anyway, here however you're looking at $75 each and up so its better to shop online. You may also find bundled kits which include the stands, umbrellas or softboxes, and umbrella swivels.

Light Modifiers
Shoot-thru umbrellas $6.62
Hands down the cheapest I've seen are these on DX.com, I'm pretty sure they are the same ones I bought way back when and mine are still holding up. All umbrellas are somewhat fragile even the pro ones so as long as you take care of them they'll last. Shoot-thru umbrellas are often preferred to reflective umbrellas because you can get them much closer to the subject (without jabbing them in the eye with the umbrella shaft of a reflective umbrella). As strobist.com has taught us the closer you get the light source to the subject the larger that apparent light source becomes and the softer the light will be.

Umbrella Softboxes ~$35 with shipping
I wrote a post about the ones I bought from Steve Kaeser's store a few years back, I still use these often and they're great. The have more spill than a softbox with a recessed light panel but less than a shoot-thru umbrella would. I looked at the Steve Kaeser store and could no longer find them, I did however find ebay listings and that's where I got the price from.

Westcott Apollo 28" Softbox $129.99
This doesn't really fall into the budget category but I'd recommend using some of your early photography profits to buy one. I've used mine on countless shoots and its basically my go-to modifier. Zach Arias showcases it a little in his Onelight DVD seminar which I highly recommend checking out as well.

Umbrella Swivels
Once you have umbrellas, lightstands, and flashes, you'll need some way of attaching them all together. There are tons of different swivels but here are some from Dealextreme that I either own or are similar enough to ones I own. 

Cheap yet sturdy umbrella swivel $8.07
This will do the trick provided you have actual light stands and are not using tripods.

Slightly less cheap but more versatile swivel $11.40
This swivel includes a 1/4" insert allowing you to use it both with a standard light stand post or with a tripod.

Assuming you buy the following items, it comes to ~$242.18 CDN

YongNuo Flash x2 ($90)

Wireless Triggers - RF602 ($~42)

Spare Batteries for above triggers ($5.80)

Light Stands x2 ($75)

Shoot-Thru Umbrella x2 ($13.24)

Umbrella Swivel x2 (the cheaper ones $16.14) 

Optional extras you might find useful

Studio Grey Card/Focusing Screen $9.93

These are used to give your editing software a reference for white balance, shoot one photo with the subject holding it and then when editing say in Adobe Lightroom you can just click on it with the dropper tool and it'll adjust the white balance automatically. You need to use it every time you change lighting conditions (moving from open sunlit area to say shaded tree etc).

Bounce Reflector $13.97
Great for outdoor available light work but also handy when using lighting.

AA Battery holders $2.36

Once you start using flashes you'll need to have batteries on hand for them, I found these cases are great for carrying them.

Lenspen $2.89

If you don't already have one of these you absolutely need one, the name brand ones run about $12.

Quickstrap $16.60

Its basically a Black Rapid clone, but a clone that is about 20% the price! Once you use this style of strap you won't ever use a standard strap again. At first glance the way that the camera mounts to the strap doesn't appear as elegant as the Black Rapid method, however in real-world use I find its better because the camera can be mounted to a tripod still without having to remove the strap. It also comes in a double version if you have two cameras.

Recommended tutorials/DVD workshops:

Onelight by Zach Arias
Great on location shoots with walkthroughs. The strobist dvds below are amazing as well but I found Zach's style of shooting and the location type work that he did resonated with me more than David Hobby's stuff. If you can afford only one I'd recommend this one, especially if you're just starting out and only have "one" light :)

Strobist - The Blog

This is basically the main resource I used to teach myself off-camera lighting, all the info is free you just have to do a lot of reading :) Go through the Lighting 101 series first.

Strobist DVD

All of the info the blog's "Lighting 101" series has to offer but presented visually. Some of the concepts are much easier to see than to read so this might be a good option.

Strobist - Lighting in Layers DVD

The follow up to the first DVD listed

Hope this helps some of you and ideally saves you from wasting money on stuff you don't really need so you can put it to better use like buying Prime Lenses.

Go Go Gadgets On The Go

I've got a few pieces of gear to share with you that I'm starting to find invaluable, they are all small and easily portable and meant for use on the go.

The main item I wanted to discuss is my new eeePC netbook, its been a few weeks now and I'm convinced that nobody should be without one least of all photographers packing light.

eeePC

When I first heard about the miniaturized laptop movement (OLPC, uMPC, eeePC etc) a lot of people were saying they were severely underpowered and for the price you could get a decent laptop for $100 more. Because of this I kept my distance but decided I'd check in on the technology once in awhile. A few weeks ago I finally took the plunge, my b-day was around the corner and I figured I'd treat myself with a netbook.

I settled on the ASUS eeePC 1005HA model, it seemed to have enough oomph to do basic tasks and have a long enough battery life to get me through any typical shooting jobs. After having it for awhile now I find I underestimated both the power and the battery life (although admittedly I did upgrade to 2GB of RAM). I've had laptops before and they did their jobs however I often hated lugging around all the power adapters etc. Battery life on most laptops was about 2-3hrs but I never trusted that and found myself never bringing it anywhere that I couldn't plug it in anyway. The netbook however gives me 6hrs + of constant heavy use and 8-10hrs of light use and standby, I've yet to even have a low battery warning pop up.

Far from being underpowered I find myself running all sorts of programs on this machine, even crunching through 200MB+ psd files in Photoshop. I just finished a series of art prints that I made almost entirely on the netbook, from vectorizing them in Inkscape to layering/blending/compositing them in PS.

I'm always working on a project of some sort and this netbook lets me take my work wherever I want to go, from whipping up a 3D model in Sketchup to making a quick poster for a friend's charity event in Gimp I have the tools to do it wherever I take my netbook.

For even more versatility I installed Ubuntu 9.04 through Wubi which is an installer that lets you install Linux as if it were a regular program in Windows (good for newbs like me). Provided you have a wired internet connection to start with getting the rest of the eeePC specific drivers and bells & whistles installed was easy, I followed most of this guy's post on how to do it. His article is for installing it as the main OS instead of dual boot which the install through Wubi creates. Also he is using the netbook remix edition of Ubuntu. He lists all of the packages you need to install though to get the wifi working and all the function keys etc, just type them into Synaptic and you'll be good to go.

Here is what makes it great for photographers:

• Portable Storage - Use it on location to dump memory cards, even if you have enough cards to handle your shoot it still provides a level of redundancy in case a card fails or you accidentally delete the contents.
• Impromptu Slideshow - Showing your client/model/customer the shots you've just taken on the back of your camera is often cumbersome and doesn't give them a good view, use the netbook instead to give them a better show.
  
• Image Editing - While it isn't quite a desktop replacement you can still do quite a bit of editing on this machine. Sometimes doing a quick edit to show the client your concept and make sure you're on the same page can save you wasted time later in post.
• Internet Access - This assumes you have an available wifi access point, you can upload shots to say Flickr or Picasa etc shortly after you take them or post them on your blog.

iTouch/iPhone
The next piece of gear I wanted to share was a device that almost nobody has heard about ;) Ok fine so they're ridiculously popular, so popular in fact I actually avoided upgrading my 60GB ipod photo purely because I didn't want to jump on the bandwagon. I was foolish to fight progress, the iTouch I picked up is a very versatile piece of gear. Its like a mini computer really, the web browsers I've used on small devices previously (pda's, Sony PSP, etc) were frustrating to use and very slow. The iTouch/iPhone browser experience is lightyears ahead of those and its fairly speedy too, all that remains is for apple to pull their heads out of their a$$es and allow flash to work on them.

Here's what makes it great for photographers.

• Portfolio in your pocket - Whether you're just showing friends your latest photoshoot or pitching yourself to a prospective client it is handy to have your entire portfolio at your fingertips.
  
• Apps galore - While most of the photography apps in the store are geared towards gimicky effects for the iPhone's camera there are some that can be used for serious photographers. Some are simple calculators for Depth Of Field (DOF), some simply tell you sunrise and sunset times by your location, others give suggestions for shooting in certain situations (neon lights, campfire, lightning, aurora etc) but some like the dSLR remote lets you control your camera remotely and even see through the viewfinder (only on certain models).
• Portable inspiration - When browsing the interwebs keep a folder of photos you find inspiring or of shots you'd like to try, then dump them periodically to your ipod. This is also handy for keeping an album of poses if you're shooting people, often times I'll draw a blank mid-shoot on how to pose the subject only to realize afterwards that I should have tried "this angle" or "done that instead".
  
• Maps* - Running late and can't find the location you're supposed to be shooting at? There's an app for that ;) Google maps can be very handy in this instance, this summer while on a roadtrip to BC our car overheated and thanks to the ipod we found a VW dealer only 1.5 kM from where we were. *This assumes you have wifi (or a data plan on the iPhone).
• Scout Locations (Using iPhone Camera) - See an interesting alleyway or perhaps an alluring spiral staircase that you want to come back to for a shoot? Take a snap of it. Some software even lets you geotag the location so you can even get directions back to where you took the photo.

Digimate III portable HDD and card dumper
This device made the list because of its potential, I truly haven't reached the point of not being able to live without it. Long story short the one I received had some bent pins in the CF card slot so I'm in the process of getting a replacement. Hopefully that doesn't scare you off though, this is the first incident I've had like this in many many orders from this company so they're track record is still good!!!

Essentially this device is an enclosure for a 2.5" laptop hard drive, however unlike most of its kind this one had built in card readers and a chip that lets you plug in a memory card and copy its contents to the hard drive. I really can't believe there aren't more products like it out there, the ones that do exist are often so overpriced they go extinct quickly due to lack of sales.

I was able to test out the one I received using other memory card slots however and found it to work very well, transfer speeds while not blazing fast were more than sufficient.

This device is really just a shell, you need to still purchase a hard drive to stick into it. The price of drives comes down daily so for as little as $50 you can buy a 250GB sata drive. On that note I should point out that there are 2 versions of this item, one for SATA drives and one for IDE drives. IDE drives are starting to reach the end of their lifecycle and are therefore become more expensive than the more abundant SATA drives. Unfortunately I didn't realize there was a SATA version when I ordered mine so I was stuck with IDE and a 160GB size limitation.

I'll try to post a followup on this device once I get my replacement. I can't see myself using it every day (except maybe as just a portable HDD) but I can see it being a great companion while travelling and for an extra layer of redunancy during photoshoots. One final thing to note however, this device requires the HDD to be formatted as FAT32 which is something that Windows has issues with. Windows will limit you to a max of 32GB partition size which can be annoying. You'll need to use a third party software program to format the drive, I used GParted in Ubuntu as a quick method but plenty of tools exist for Windows environments too.

Why it's great for photographers:

• Large storgage - Even if you get the IDE version which is limited to 160GB thats still a ton of shots. I carry two 16GB cards when shooting RAW with my 5DMKII and don't often worry about space, this would be like having 10 cards.
• PC Free Transfers - If you're like me you already have enough gear to lug around, being able to travel without a pc (even a netbook) will cut your weight down a lot.
• Extra Redunancy - Even if you have tons of memory cards and don't require the extra space its still a good idea not to keep all your eggs in one basket. Dumping the cards to this device will help protect you against accidental data loss.
  

DIY Ringflash for approx $20

I actually made this tutorial by taking stills from sketchup google's free 3d rendering program. Its very handy for designing projects like this, it lets you see how everything is going to fit together first. Hope you like it, I'll hopefully post some sample images soon.

Just when I'd lost faith in customer service...

**This is a bit of a long rant and if you don't read the whole thing you may get a bad opinion of the EyeFi company, I just want to state here that I fully recommend their innovative product. I had a bad experience at first but their amazing customer support rectified the problems and then some.**

I've been having real bad luck lately with products and services. It seems everywhere I turn its as if I'm being given the "priviledge" of spending my money instead of the stores being greatful to have me as a customer. I've seen a drop in service everywhere ranging from getting a burger in a drivethru that was missing the most important part, the meat patty, to waiting 3 months for an order to ship. I starting thinking that maybe the economic crisis might actually be a good thing, the companies that don't wise up will simply be replaced by the ones that do because the others will be filing for bankruptcy.


"Where's the beef?"

It was with this gloomy picture in my head that I decided to purchase one of the new Eye-Fi SD cards for my camera. If you haven't heard of them I suggest you check out their site at www.eye.fi They have an ingenious little product that will automatically upload the photos from your camera to your computer (and photo sharing sites like Flickr etc) and geotag them so you know where you were when you took them.

Upon purchasing a card I was immediately greeted with a defective card reader that came with the card. Not a huge deal since I have multiple readers. I notified customer service and requested a replacement. I was later told that a replacement was issued and would be shipped to the address I provided. Ok. Great.

I then took advantage of thier "suggest a feature" in the Eye-Fi forums. I suggested that they offer a free trial for their Geotagging service. As I had only bought the EyeFi "Share" model my card did not have this feature though a 1yr subcription was available for a small fee. Since the geotagging feature works best in densly populated urban areas I did not want to take the plunge and go for a full year only to find out it didn't work. A few days later I had a reply stating they liked the idea and would let me know when this was available. A few weeks later and I was given instructions on how to access my free trial. I still had to provide a credit card number so that if I liked the service it would automatically subcribe me for 1yr if I did not cancel before the end of the 30 days. Fine, sounds reasonable, I'll do it. I try out the service over the Christmas holidays and I find it neat but given the small size of my city there was not enough wifi coverage to always get an accurate geotag. I decided in the end to hold off a little while, cancel my trial, then maybe renew it if I new I'd be going on a trip.

This is where I got frustrated. I could not find a way to cancel the trial so I had to email support, ok no big deal. I received a repsonse saying my autorenewal had been cancelled and that I would not be billed for the 1yr subscription. A few days later I receive and automated email stating that my autorenewal had just been completed and I was now subscribed for 1yr. Ok, maybe they forgot to cancel the automailer no big deal. Fast forward a few days again and I see it on my bank statement. I now was billed for a service I cancelled and to top it off I couldn't even use the feature because it had been disabled in my Eyefi account. This is when I lost it. I wrote a lengthy email explaining just what happened to me from the beginning of my whole experience. I was not vulgar, I did not swear, but I was maybe a little scathing albeit in an articulate fashion. Then I waited.

Later that same day I saw an email pop up in my inbox from Eyefi, to be honest I wasn't expecting much. I was wrong, not only did they address all of my problems and refund my autorenewal, they went on to apologize for my experience and to make up for it sent me an EyeFi Explore card (the step up from mine) that has unlimited geotagging. I was floored, I wasn't expecting this at all. Most times its hard enough to get what is owed to you, very seldomly do you also get compensated for your troubles.

Now I don't want people expecting to get free stuff from EyeFi or any other company by writing letters complaining about stuff. I know there are people out there who would try to take advantage of something like this and perhaps even lie to do so. Please do not do this. I would however say that you should give feedback, both negative and positive, when it is due. Stand up for your rights as a consumer, it is ok to complain if it is warranted. On the flip side, if a company has a good product or you've had a great experience dealing with them by all means spread the word and help them out!! Its by doing this that you'll help the companies that are worth keeping stay around while the out of touch companies file for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

I plan on posting a full review of the EyeFi card in the next few days. I won't pull any punches just because of the great service I got, there are a few things I'd change with the product but all in all I would still highly recommend it. Stay tuned to find out why.