A number of people asked about how to trigger a flash that is behind the Lumodi Beauty Dish that I talked about a few days ago. The Canon wireless eTTL system leavesa lot to be desired (like range, non-line of site operation, reliability, etc) and hiding a flash behind a light modifier, especially a solid one like the Lumodi dish is the perfect recipe for your flash to not work properly. In preparation for a trip to Maui tomorrow, I wanted to test out a set of PocketWizard ControlTL units to demonstrate how and why we might want to use devices like this.

Why PocketWizards?

This isn’t really an article about why or why not to use PocketWizards per-say, but the PocketWizards do provide unique functionality that other systems do not. Could I fire the flash with the dish on it using a $24 Cactus v4? Of course I could, and many times that may be all you need. If you are good with a shutter speed of around 1/160th of a second, these cheap wireless systems will work just fine. Let’s take the first image above, notice the well exposed sky and background, this was taken with the sky overhead in bright sun. That image was taken at ISO 200, f/5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/1,600th of a second. Thats TEN TIMES faster than a cheap manual flash can do. With a shutter speed this fast, the sky is exposed properly (this technique is called high speed sync), if I had to shoot at a much slower shutter speed, the sky would be completely blown out. Also, since the PocketWizard system is wireless, the flash can be hidden behind the dish and will still fire.

Why not just use natual light?

ISO 100 f/5.6 1/640th No Flash

Because natural light sucks. Maybe I should explain that some more. You have very little control over natural ligh and no way of “fixing” bad natural lighting. Sure, I might be able to bring in a reflector and completely blind the subject (in this case me) but reflectors can have their own issues and more often than not, they require an assistant to hold and adjust to get the light just right.

Notice with these two images that were taken at the same time, one with flash and one without, the image without flash suffers from heavy, sharp shadows and dark eye sockets (racoon eyes).

ISO 100 f/5.6 1/640th

The image taken with flash is more evenly lit. Granted, I don’t make the best subject and I am trying to overexaggerate the lighting effect to help make it more understandable, but you can see that the racoon eyes are gone as well. Learning to balance the flash and ambient is really the key to making your images look natural even when throwing in flash to help them out.

So again, yes, you can certainly start off with cheap wireless triggers but you also need to understand their limitations and be able to work within those confines, you would not be able to balance flash and ambient in a bright outdoor shoot while being limited to less than 1/200th of a second. For studio work or more controlled lighting environments, manual flash and remote triggers will very often be the only thing you need. However, if you really want to take full advantage of your system and be able to switch from manual to eTTL and let the camera and flash help get your exposures right, as well as do tricks like high speed sync, then the ControlTL system is going to be the solution you are looking for.

Final lighting setup

For those of you wanting to see the final lighting setup used on the last two images, here it is. The camera was about 20 feet away using a Sigma 24-70 lens. A 580EX II flash was mounted on a tripod using the FlexTT5 Transceiver with the Lumodi 14″ beauty dish mounted on it. The light was position to the right of the subject at about a 45 degree angle to provide direction lighting in the same angle that the natural sunlite was coming from.

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