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Photography by Nicholas Wall

Tech Friday – Inexpensive Flash Trigger

Tech Friday – Inexpensive Flash Trigger
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It seems that lately Tech Friday has become a weekly iPad app review.  So this week I thought I'd mix things up by discussing some great photography accessories (minus the iPad). My Canon 7D has a built in flash, which I really like because it can be used as a trigger for my Canon Speedlite 580EX II.  Indoors it works great where there are multiple planes to bounce the trigger flash off of to reach the Speedlite.  But if your shooting outside, and you don’t have line of sight it doesn't always work.  So I recently bought a Yongnuo wireless flash remote set.  I know you’ve probably never even heard of that brand (neither did I), but the price of two pocket wizards are about 10x the price of one set of these so I thought I'd give it a try.

 

Yongnuo RX-600TX / Yongnuo RX-602TX

FlashTrigger

First impress: Well worth $35. It does exactly what it says; when you take a shot it triggers the flash at whatever power is set on the flash.  It does not support TTL (which is understandable for the price).  So you have to set the flash to manual and change the setting from the flash rather than from the camera.

FlashTrigger2

WirelessTrigger

Setup was very simple; the batteries are put in the transmitter and receiver, you put the transmitter on your camera’s hot shoe, while the flash goes in the hot shoe on top of the receiver, then simply turn the receiver on and shoot away. It claims that it works up to 100 meters but I noticed problems triggering around 25 meters away with large objects in the way – still I thought it was a great value for the money and for most photographers 25 meters is more than enough. The transmitter also has a button on the top, which can be used to fire a test flash.

 

As an added bonus it can also be used as a wireless shutter release.  There is a cable that comes with the set that plugs into the receiver which then plugs into the remote shutter port on the side of the camera.  You can let the receiver just hang off the camera or you can place it in the camera’s hot shoe to hold it.  Now with the transmitter in hand just press the button down half way to focus then completely down to fire the shot.  The one problem is, for some reason if you have your camera in burst mode it will fire a minimum of two shots.  My 7D has two burst modes normal (3.0 FPS) and high (8.0 FPS).  It does so in both modes.  The only way to prevent it is put your camera to single shot mode.  Other than this small adjustment, I am very happy with my recent purchase.

 

Conclusion

For the money, it functions great.  It doesn’t support TTL, but I would not expect a $35 accessory to do so.  I’m not sure about the durability of the device, but if I get a year or two of use out of it I will be extremely satisfied.

 

 


 

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