5/10/2009 - Portraits w/ Remote TTL Flash

Using remote slaves is a nice way to have a portable lighting studio. The downside of slaves is that all your flash exposure needs to be done manually (unless you have the new TTL-capable triggers from PocketWizard. However, both Canon and Nikon have remote capabilities built into their flashes (i.e. their flashes can talk to other flashes of the same brand and compatible models).

These pictures were taken with one remote 580ex as the mainlight, and a 580ex II in the hotshoe for fill. The mainlight is on a stand to camera right and is unfiltered. The fill on the camera is bounced into the corner of the ceiling and wall behind the camera.



The fill is programmed as the master flash and defaults to group A. The main is set as a slave and programmed to group B. Using this method, I am then able to control flash exposure compensation of both flashes from the master on the camera. Even better, I can set a flash exposure ratio difference between the master and the slave. In both cases, the ratio of master (fill) to slave (main) was 1:8.

My makeshift studio on this day was in my screenroom. I exposed so that the background ambient light outside was underexposed. There was little light inside, so my subjects are being lit primarily by my lighting setup