big_lan said:
Hi all.
was wondering if any of you have advice or recommendations on light sources for night use.
I will be using it to take photos of skaters at night.
hoping for something portable and battery operated.
an example of what i'm looking for.
http://www.es-sk8.gr.jp/trick/2003Nov7-ShinTTsoul.htm
thanks and pelase feel free to comment!
The earlier poster is quite right. You can do it with a hotshoe flash but I'd add the following:
First, you'd want to use a
very fast recycling battery strobe. I like Nikon SB25 hotshoe flashes for this kind of thing - I am sure there are other similarly fast recycling alternatives as well. With the SB25 for example, recycling at full power manual is about 2.5s with NIMH batteries and much less if you're using it at half power.
SB-25 and a Venca radio slave
If you're after a cheap strobe that pumps out quite a bit of light for it's small size with a great recycling rate, you can't do much better than with a National PE-201M (GN20, recycles in 2 secs with 4 NIMH batteries, and costs about $20! You can still buy them at shops that export to India - quite a few of them are situated at High St). A small secret is that you can plug in Wein peanut slaves into the strobe's sync cord socket since it uses the same socket as the Vivitar 283/285 that the Peanuts have been designed for - more about the Wein slave cells further down.
National PE-201M with Wein Peanut XL on mini-pod
Wein peanut slaves plug directly into the PE-201M sync cable socket
Second, there's the issue of
triggering the strobe. I usually use radio slaves and I often velcro one on top of the SB unit (as shown in the first picture). This way, you can place the strobe almost anywhere and trigger it as you please. You can of course hook up a few hotshoe flash units so that you can combine lighting in different ways.
Radio slave kits are unfortunately not cheap. An alternative to this would be to use an IR slave with an IR trigger. Typically, the slave end is the one that gives the most problems since, in my experience with a lot of brands, many are simply not sensitive enough at distance esp. in the open (those compact strobes with built in slave eyes are never sensitive enough).
I'd suggest you use
Wein slave cells (
http://www.weinproducts.com/batteryfree.htm). A Wein High Performance Peanut slave PN-XL would be excellent - it's good to 300 feet and is really pretty sensitive. Even better are their Ultra Slaves which are rated to supposedly 3000 feet but I'd take that with a pinch of salt. A cheap Peanut XL with a cheap IR trigger would cost you about S$130-190 together. If you're shooting with other people who are also using flash at the same time, you'd be better off either with a radio slave kit set to your own exclusive frequency or a coded IR slave/transmitter kit.
You can get your Wein photo slave cells, IR triggers and radio slaves from Cathay Photo (
http://www.cathayphoto.com.sg}.
This, thankfully, is one of my more useful posts. Hope this helps
ps. if you want to save money on the IR trigger, you can make your own by taking a small fast recycling strobe, and filter the flash output using unexposed (but processed) E6 film. 2 to 3 layers of film will effective cut out most of the available light, letting only IR pass through. That or just use a low powered flash to trigger the slaved flashes - might even be good to add some fill from the camera direction too.
