hello I'm Graham and I hope everyone's having a great day welcome to this video
in which I'm looking up repurposing flash units for use with your bridge
cameras In this case we'll be looking at the panasonic bridge camera but it
doesn't really matter which camera were talking about as they all will work in
the same way. Now over the years I've had digital cameras or film cameras
I bought the manufactures flash unit for that particular camera so when I had
Nikon units I had no Nikon flash guns know that I got canon and I switched
over to canon flash units and with the panasonic of what the panasonic ones or
the god ox range which are panasonic compatible so i've got quite an array of
flash units and i thought it would be a shame not to be able to repurpose those
to use them in the studio for fill lights or back lights or hair lights and
you can do that in very many ways so first of all let's look at how we can
repurpose any manufactures gun to work on the camera well first of all it's
down to the hotshoe configuration and each manufacturer has a different
hotshoe configuration dependent on the type of data that it wants to
communicate between the flash unit and the camera now some units have got four
pins some units have got five some i've got six it depends again on the
manufacturer and they all have different placements so you may find that the
cannon and the panasonic ones are lying perfectly but the Nikon doesn't align
with either of those two so there are some disparities the main pulse is fired
from the center electrode respect to ground so the central electrode pose a
flat bottom trigger voltage down to zero and that causes the flash to fire the
other pins are used for data communication so they're very low
voltage and very low current now it depends on the shoe interface whether
the pins are aligned with the camera that you using or not but in general
terms you won't have an issue with the data pins causing problems or destroying
the flash or the camera because of that contact if you are worried then you can
get these passed through hot shoes which you've only got a central electrode and
a top electrode and none of those data pins will actually come into contact
with camera or the flash unit but if you
wanted to use that then that's an option it does mean that you're extending the
flash unit a little bit further off of the camera so you're applying a little
bit more pressure to the TUF that camera through the leverage effect but if you
want safety then use one of these dumb hot shoe adapters we can use the flash
unit directly on top of the camera so for example with the Panasonic system if
I slide on this cannon flash unit and I take an exposure let's set this into the
manual mode so in manual mode one per the path set to one 128 so when I fire
the camera the flash will fire as you expected to so if it changed out the
cannon unit for this old Minolta system Minolta was bought out by sunny if you
remember some years ago but the old Minolta system had the standard hot shoe
weather no the Sony have got the propriety type so again with this flush
unit mounted on the camera it will fire with the center pin so that will apply
to this Nikon as well so you can use them directly on camera you will vary
the exposure by varying the power of the flash and the aperture in your camera
remember those are the energy components which will affect your flash exposure
flash power which is really flash duration and the aperture you set on the
camera with most of these guns now you can go down to one 128 power with the
old Minolta one you can only go down to 16th power as you go into the motor
drive unit which gives you a shorter pulse so you have the opportunity of
changing flash power and aperture to get your exposure right if you're still
finding that the camera flash is too powerful and of course you can fit ND
filters to the front of the camera and that will then change your exposure as
you would expect it to if we don't use the flash on camera we wanted to use it
remotely because our pop-up flash is going to be using the TTL exposure it
will use a pre flash to determine that exposure so when the pre flash goes off
if we don't set it up flush unit to be in a slave mode which will suppress that
pre flush the slow flash will fire when it sees the pre flash and it won't
contribute to the exposure so if we're using TTL pop-up flash we must set our
slave unit into what's called the s2 mode and the s2 mode suppresses that
first flash so I've set that up now to the s2 mode so when I fire the camera
the pre flash will determine the exposure the power level for the main
flash on the camera and then my slave trigger which I can set to a variable
power will contribute to the exposure so though pre flash happened determine the
exposure of the main flash and then when the main flash went off the slave flash
applied its exposure to that image so you can vary the amount of power on
your flash or its distance to your subject to vary the amount of
contribution to the exposure it's better if you want to use two flashes to put
another flash unit on the camera in the manual mode use that to set the main
exposure and then another flash and the s-1 mode so it will fire synchronously
with the main flash and then you can vary the power on that second flash to
give you the fill that you require and then you can expand that to your buck
light or a hair light to give you the amount of flash exposures you want so
how would you actually do that you could use up to optical triggering on all the
systems so you could have a four flash units all triggered on the s1 and all at
different powers to give you the exposure you want or you could actually
use read your triggers now radio triggers of an advantage over the
optical trigger that you can actually use them outside in sunlight
remember the optical trigger uses a light post to fire the exposure so if
the slave flash can't see that main post whereas the brightness of the sun
shining on its sensor it won't fire so in that situation a radio trigger is
ideal now these are very cheap the cheap ones less than 10 pounds are 15 dollars
if you like and they just consist of a simple transmitter and a simple receiver
and most of these have got four channels so you can set them up on one of four
channels if you have him with interference from either another
units or from local interference so they just slip on top of the camera so with
the transmitter mounted on the camera when the shutter fires it sends a radio
signal from the transmitter that's picked up by the receiver which in turn
then fires the flash of virus hot shoot contact so I've got two flashes that
appear in the radio trigger mode one is a very old unit which has got a very
very high trigger voltage of 250 volts but that's okay with these triggers
because they can stand that for us to connect that to the camera either by us
hot shoe or by the sync cord it would damage the contacts or the circuitry in
the camera because of that very high trigger voltage so that was one way of
repurposing this old flash gun has got a very very high power but unfortunately
the trigger voltage is too higher so by using a radio transmitter and receiver
system you can actually repurpose those old flash guns so now when I fire the
camera that transmitter will send a pulse will be picked up by both of those
radio receivers and will fire those flashes together so that we've expanded
the system with the radio trigger to expand the system of course I can add
more slave triggers more radio slave triggers or a combination of optical and
radio triggers so we're only getting the one post to the flash unit so they will
fire just the once it will be picked up by the optical trigger in the swarm mode
and now I can have the two radio triggers and the one optical trigger
into the equation so you probably noticed there that when the radio
triggers fired the optical slave trigger saw those lights and then fired itself
so if I repeat that radio trigger firing the two radio receivers they in turn
caused the slave flashes to fire as soon as the light post was seen by the slave
it too contributed to the exposure you can't run into latency issues
between the time it takes for the camera to respond to the transmitter the
transmitter responding to the receivers the receivers in tone
having to fire the slave units and that light being picked up by the slave unit
in the optical mode so the actual third flash might be a few microseconds behind
the main flash so if you've got any in the high-speed movement in your subject
you may see a strobe effect because of the two flashes I'm actually in
synchronicity there's a slight delay between the two but for most purposes
you're in a studio portrait type situation you're not going to notice
that delay with the more modern radio receivers such as the young you oh they
are actually multi-channel transmitter so you can have sixteen channels you can
then actually have got young you all flash units which have got built-in
receiver so you don't actually need to put a receiver on the hot shoe they
respond directly through the transmitter receiver of the flash unit and you can
get master flash units which actually allow you to set up those units remotely
so you don't have to go to each flush unit in turn and set its power level you
can do that from a muster commander and again young you're a masters at doing
that with the more modern radio systems like the go duck system here the X
system you can use the flash on camera as a master and another unit off camera
as a slave and they will fire over the radio waves and gain giving the full
control so that's how to repurpose some of your old flashes on bridge cameras or
DSLRs hope you found that useful now I did write a blog article about
repurposing some of the old flash guns and I'll put a link to that in the video
description below now in the article it shows you how to measure your on trigger
voltages from your old flash units or gives a list a link to a website which
has got an inventory of all the flash units and their trigger voltages so if
they're under 10 volts then you're probably okay to fit them to a camera
without any possibility of them frying the electronics but if the more than 20
volts then I would hesitate in putting them on the camera fit them to a radio
trigger which has got a high tolerance to the trigger voltages so until the
next video I hope you found that useful please do take care and I'll see you all
in the next one good bye for now