Flash trigger ?

[gliderbee]

Because of the "radio flash trigger" thread, and because I don't want to hijack it, I started a new thread for my question:

What is the use of a radio flash trigger ? AFAIK, the Epson RD1 can't control multiple flashes by itself, right ?

"when I was young" 🙄, I had these small slave flashshoe's that fired the flash when "seeing" another flashlight (being the camera- or "master"flash; I even think I still have one lying around somewhere). As I remember, it always worked with any flash in any condition, master or slave.

What does this radio flash trigger do on top of that ?

Thanks,
Stefan.

 

[Vince Lupo]

It has a few purposes -- as you say, with the flash slaves the other flashes need to 'see' the flash that's directly connected to the camera in order for them to be triggered. With the radio slave, no flash needs to be connected to the camera at all (in other words, all your flashes can be remote), and they don't need to 'see' another flash to operate. They can be placed in a different room, 25 feet away, etc.

The second and equally important thing is this: say you've set up lights at an event, and there's all these other photographers in the room popping their on-camera flashes. If you were using a one of those flash slaves, they would also be triggering your flashes. With the radio slave, your flashes are on a dedicated radio frequency chosen by you -- so only you are activating those flashes. That's very helpful, say, if you were shooting a wedding or another situation where there would be the likelihood of other people with flashing cameras.

Hope this explanation helps....

 

[gliderbee]

It sure helps, thanks 🙂 !

Stefan.

 

[charjohncarter]

A couple of other smaller things that radio triggers do, if you are using off camera flash: you lose cables so you aren't messing with that layer of frustration, and you can attach your radio trigger to some flash meters (Sekonics are one brand) and prefire to get the F stop. This last reason is very helpful as you aren't tempted to use the Auto setting or TTL which can produce inconsistent results.