Michael, I want to add my kudos to the long list of folks who have
benefited by your flash work and FAQ. Priceless! I have another
question if you don't mind - I plan on using this flash for some
amateur (family) portrait work where I would want the flash a fair
distance away from the camera - on a tripod. My thinking is that I
may not allways want to have the on-camera flash operating to get
the proper shadows on the face, (which would precude the use of an
optical trigger?) so what would be the best way to trigger it? You
mention a pc splitter. Would I need a different module for that? Or
would radio triggers be better. I know next to nothing about this,
so any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Thanks for the kudos.
I'm confused as to what you are trying to do, so let me mention some possibilities.
1) Having one flash, some distance away from the camera. Many wedding photographers use this type of setup with a bracket that has the flash about 12" away from the lens so they don't have red-eye. The favored position is above the camera so that shadows will fall down, instead of to the sides as it would be on L-shaped brackets with the light off to one side. In this case, you you not enable the on-board flash.
2) Having one flash, bouncing the light off of a ceiling, wall, or a bounce card. This makes the light softer and more even. I tend to favor this approach using a Lumiquest midi-bounce (~ $20-30), particularly when shooting people/pets in non-posed situations. You do lose some amount of distance that the flash can reach by this approach.
3) Having two flashes, one that provides most of the light bounced off of a bounce card, and the other that acts as a fill flash. You can use either the builtin flash or on the fill light on the 5750DX. I haven't really tried this yet, but I would worry about the fill flash causing red-eye.
4) Having two or more independent flashes. Typically when you do this, you leave the realm of TTL flashes, and need to go to manual flash setups where you fix the f-stop and speed. For this I bought the 71177 adapter, which takes a pc-sync connector, and use the FL-CB04 cable I used with the Kalimar flash. I haven't bought it yet, but you can get Y adapters that split pc-sync between two flashes, each of which has a wire connecting it to the Y adapter. There are many different thoughts on light placement (see the various books on studio photography, or browse the lighting forum). One thought is to have the main flash in front, and have a hair highlight flash behind your subjects.
5) A varient on #4 is to have the second flash be a slave flash, triggered either optically (with a slave trigger that can ignore the pre-flash) or via a radio transmitter (that takes a pc-sync input). The advantage here is less wires.
6) More involved studio setups include things like Alien Bees, which are beyond my expertise.
