You just bought Strobes and now you need to know how to sync them with your camera.
Here's how.
Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan.
Today on "The Slanted Lens," we're gonna talk about how to sync your camera with your strobes.
There's three basic ways we're gonna talk about today.
These are the three that I think are the most practical.
There is a myriad of ways to make this happen all because of DIY kinds of tricks and workarounds.
But we're gonna talk about the three basic ways to sync your camera with your strobes.
So, number one.
It's the easiest and probably the most effective with regards to not failing way to sync your
strobes with your camera, is just simply the cable that came with your strobe.
Or you can purchase these at B&H or through the RMS affiliate program.
These are simply a sync.
The sync goes on the side of the camera right here and now you simply run this all the way
over to your strobe.
And now when I take a picture, it syncs.
The pros are it's extremely reliable.
It's the most reliable way to fire your strobes.
The cons are that your strobe can only go as far away from your camera as this cable.
And then this cable lays on the ground and you've got people tripping on it, and it's
kind of a pain in the butt.
And it's very difficult because you can only fire one strobe with it.
Only one.
So, number two is using the electronic slaves that are on most strobe heads that are made
today.
So, this power pack here has an electronic slave on the top of fit, and you can put this
over to the slave.
And this one over to the slave and this one to the slave.
And what it's doing is if it gets a flash of light, that light is collected in this
little slave here.
And it sees the light and it goes, "Oh, there's a flash."
And so it flashes the unit that it's connected to.
So right now I have my cable to one.
When it goes off, it's going to reflect in the electronic eye of the other two and it's
gonna fire all three.
Here we go.
And there they go, all three went off.
So now that's slave mode.
But we're still connected to this cable.
So what we can do is get rid of this.
We're going to now add a strobe to the camera.
And we're going to use this to fire the other strobes in our shot.
I'm running this on manual because I do not want this to overpower the work that these
other three are doing.
My goal is that these three are my lighting and this just becomes the trigger that sets
my camera.
Now the pro of this situation is, what really is positive about this, is that I can get
this as far away from my set as I want.
And I can fire it off.
The negative or the downside of this is that it does bring the light up on set.
So that can be sometimes hard to balance and be able to fight with.
And, secondly, is that it's gotta be fairly close.
It won't fire these in the light outside.
Outside in the bright light becomes the most difficult place to use slaves because the
slaves can't see a change in light because it's already so bright out there.
They don't respond to that.
So, they need a darker area.
Great inside, great on set, great when you're working in somebody's house but not great
when you're working outside.
So, number three.
So I'm kind of a radio slave.
There's a lot of companies that make these.
There's Radio Poppers or Pocket Wizards.
There's [inaudible 00:03:16], you know.
There's all kinds of stuff out there I'm sure.
And these are fabulous and because they conquer most of the problems.
The disadvantage of these is cost.
The first two methods we talked about are very, very inexpensive.
Even if you had to buy a small strobe to put on your camera, you can get those things for
$30 online.
But these become an expense per unit that you have to purchase.
But they overcome the issues of being outside because this will fire your strobes outside.
They'll fire your strobes a long ways away.
So I simply put this on my camera.
So this becomes a master.
This is going to send a signal out that's going to fire my strobes.
With the dyno lights and pocket wizard, the pocket wizard is already built into the dyno
light.
If you don't have that you're gonna need to get a B Unit that you hook up with a cable
to your strobe or to your mono block.
So you have your A unit on the camera, B unit at the power source, the mono block or this
other power out of the pack.
When I hit this, I sync all three of these.
I have two of them that are syncing by radio slaves and the last one is syncing by the
electronic eye or the slave on the mono block.
Now I'd like to say there are some very inexpensive options out there that really give you a great
product.
It's just how far away do they work and reliably how far away can you get them.
Some are radio.
Some are infra-red.
I mean, there's several different things out in the market today.
So, there's the three main ways to be able to sync your camera with your strobe.
But now let's take a look at my strobe cable emergency kit.
So this is my syncing emergency kit.
What I have in here is all the stuff that I need to be able to sync with anything that
I may ever need to sync to.
It's neatly organized so we know exactly what is there, exactly what we have.
But if I were to take and get rid of all of this, this is what you really need.
I have a mini jack to strobe sync.
I have a Edison to strobe sync.
And I have the quarter inch to strobe sync.
There's your three major ways you sync with strobes.
You've got your mini, your quarter and Edison.
Edison is not used that much anymore but it used to be used on speedotron strobes.
There are some out there still.
So each of these have the end that go into the sync port on your camera.
Then when I start using radio slaves which I do.
Probably most of things that we do are done with radio slaves.
It's a more expensive way to go but it's what we use constantly.
So my radio slave syncs with a mini at the back.
But now I've got to be able to adapt that to whatever strobe platform.
So I've got a mini cable, mini to mini, and then I've got an adapter that goes to quarter
and that will fire the strobes as well.
So now I don't have to buy tutoring cables but I've got the mini and I've got the adapter
and that gives the ability to sync with both of those different platforms.
I get stereo cables.
You don't have to have stereo.
You can run this on mono.
But I get stereo cables because I can use them in audio applications and other applications
as well so it's just as well have stereo.
But then, of course, I always have the cable that gives me the mini jack to the Edison
just in case I want to be able to run my radio slaves with an older platform like the speedotrons.
So there are absolutely other strobes out there that are going to have a proprietary
way to attach the cable to the back of the strobe.
They all go back to that same adaptor, to the camera, because that's standard on the
cameras.
And so you may need to look at something that's going to adapt itself to your strobe.
But these are the three major ones that you work with, most of the things you're going
to encounter in the United States.
You might think to yourself, "Well, I'm not gonna have any other strobe platforms because
I just use certain ones."
I've been on location and decided, "You know what?
We better rent a strobe."
And we're in some little town and the only thing we can find is…and you don't have
the cable.
So I carry these cables with me always so I can adapt myself to any of the different
platforms that are out there.
Also, if you check out our Mastering Studio Strobes, we go into great detail about the
different types of strobes and how you sync with each of them and how you can use them
effectively in lighting set ups as well as just the technical ways to use your strobe
equipment.
So get out there.
Check out that Mastering Studio Strobes over at theslantedlens.com.
So there's a look at cables, what will keep you from having a problem when you're on set.
Sync those strobes and make some great images.
So keep those cameras rolling.
Keep on clicking.
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