CyberSync “Sledgehammer” High Speed Sync vs. Nikon CLS Auto FP

In my post from Saturday, I explained how you can trigger remote flashes at shutter speeds that are above what your camera’s max. flash sync speed is. I thought what I was getting was High Speed Sync, but according to my buddy David Hobby it’s not quite the case. Here’s what David had to say about it:

What you are getting is not HSS, but rather a single pulse that is timed to last throughout the time the slip travels across your frame on a <250th speed. That is why you are only getting f4 at that ISO in that close.

It does work (no frame blackout) but you lose so much of the power of the flash (wasted on the blocked out part of the shutter) that it is pretty much a wash vs the CLS way. In fact, dollars to donuts I would bet you get less light via the “sledgehammer HSS” technique used here.

That said, it does apparently work, if not very efficiently. Kind like frying one of those geese with one of your radars does technically make it a microwave oven …

So what I set out to do next was compare the CyberSync method to traditional Nikon CLS and see how the two stacked up against each other with regards to power. Both methods prove to be very inefficient, but will work in a pinch if you get caught in a situation where your ambient is just too bright to knock down with shutter speed alone.

The Results
I shot these outside in early evening when the sky was still nice and bright. I metered the background at f5.6 @ 1/800th ISO200. I put an SB800 with only a diffusion dome on a lightstand, another on my D90, and connected the CyberSyncs. I set my shutter speed to 1/1000th to underexpose the background a bit. The light was 36″ away from my subjects (my daughter and her friend) whom I was able to convince to stand still for a couple minutes. The SB800 on the stand was set to full power and here’s what I got:

Obviously, it was a little too hot so I stopped down 1/3 of a stop to f6.3 and recomposed. This is what I got:

Much better. So now it was time to try out CLS. I disconnected the CyberSyncs and then put the SB800 on the lightstand in Remote and put the SB800 on my D90 in Master. I set the remote flash to Manual mode at full power. This was the result:

If you notice where the kids are in relation to the trees compared to the shots above, you will see that I actually had them standing CLOSER to the SB800 when using CLS and the shot was a little underexposed.

What’s the Take-Away?
Although the “Sledgehammer” method (as David called it) is very inefficient, it’s actually a little better than the CLS method. However, so much power is being wasted here that my NiMH batteries for my Speedlights hurt just thinking about me putting them through this kind of abuse.

To be very effective at all, you’d need to have two or three speedlights (at least, more if you wanted faster recycle times) and your shooting pace would be rather slow. It would work if you had no other options, but it isn’t really a “go-to” solution.

High Speed Sync using CyberSyncs

So I get an e-mail from my buddy and fellow D90 shooter Levi, and his e-mail contains a link to a photo that he took of a couple of flashes, triggered by CyberSyncs, f11 @ 1/4000th of a second! I was blown away! I had to go and test it out for myself and low and behold… it worked! I shot the photo above with my D90, SB800 on camera @ 1/128th power with the CyberSync CST transmitter plugged in via included mini plug to PC Sync cable, SB80DX flashes @ full power triggered with CyberSync CSRB receivers, f11 @ 1/4000th of a second, ISO200!!! WOW! Wanna learn how? Read on.

What? No hack?
No. There’s no hack that you have to perform. You need a couple of things to even think about doing this. First, you need a Nikon SB800 or SB900 and a camera that’s capable of the Auto FP High Speed Sync mode. In this day and age, that means a D80, D90, D200, D300(s), D700, or a D3. (Some older Nikon bodies are capable, but I’m not going to list them all.) Of course you’ll need the CyberSyncs (CST transmitter and CSRB receiver). Lastly, you’ll need the included mini plug to PC Sync cable that comes with the CyberSyncs. This is how you’ll connect your SB800/900 to the CyberSync CST. See the photo below:

And this is what your flash will look like with the CST connected to it before you place it in your camera’s hot shoe:

Once your flash is mounted in your camera’s hot shoe, you’ll need to make sure that the Auto FP mode is turned on. (For D90 users, go to Menu > Custom Settings Menu > Bracketing/flash > Auto FP (e5) and turn it On. Once you’ve turned Auto FP on, then you can power on your flash. I then set my SB800 to Manual mode @ 1/128th power and positioned the flash head at 90 degrees (straight up). FYI, you could set the power higher and point it towards your subject for a little on-axis fill if desired. Then, as long as your other flashes and CyberSync CSRB receivers are powered on, you’ll be good to go and flashing away at ridiculously high shutter speeds that you never thought you could have with your CyberSyncs!

Got Power?
Look at the above test shot of Benjamin that I lit with 1 – SB80DX through a Lastolite Ezybox at f4, 1/4000th, ISO200. I had the 24″ x 24″ softbox in nice and close and you can see how quickly the light will fall off with a shutter speed of 1/4000th of second! Keep in mind that the SB80DX was at full power. To pull this kind of thing off with speedlights, you’re going to need more than one in most cases. If you can shoot really wide open, you might be able to get away with it… however you will need to have your light(s) in nice and close. This is where a Lastolite Triflash would come in REAL handy. To really do this right, you could use a high powered studio strobe like an AB1600 or the like.

Further Testing Needed
I only played around with this in the house tonight because it was already dark when I got the chance to have some fun with it. I want to test this outside in full daylight with a few more speedlights to see what I can come up with. I also ran into one small issue while testing this: if I put the camera down and it went into “sleep mode”, my SB800 would sort of “lock up” and my camera would default back to the max flash sync speed of 1/200th of a second. Not really sure why this was happening. I couldn’t use the power button to shut of the flash, but a quick opening of the battery door and closing it again did the trick.

So there you have it folks… High Speed Sync without using Nikon’s Creative Lighting System. RadioPoppers have been doing this for quite awhile now, but they are most well-known for extending the range of your flashes when using CLS. With the CyberSyncs, you have to do everything manually still, which is what I prefer. I’ll have more to follow later on this week, which will include testing this outside… in full daylight. Stay tuned!

Review: The Hot Shoe Diaries – Big Light From Small Flashes by Joe McNally

I had mentioned several days ago that I had bought and was reading Joe McNally’s new book, “The Hot Shoe Diaries – Big Light From Small Flashes” and now that I’m finished reading it, it’s time for a review! This is Joe’s second book, following “The Moment It Clicks” which was a huge success. Let’s take a closer look at what is one of the hottest photography books this year.

The Hot Shoe Diaries starts off with the usual tribute and acknowledgements. I mention this because of the way Joe writes, I recommend reading this book cover-to-cover. It’s worth it. There isn’t a single piece of text in this book that I consider useless.

The book is broken down into four parts and each part has several texts, each of which tie back to the broader subject of the part. For example, Part I is titled, “Nuts ‘n’ Bolts” and it breaks down what gear McNally uses and why he uses it. It’s a basic run down of how he works, right down to how he holds his camera. He talks about camera bodies, glass (lenses), speedlights, grip gear and more. What an incredible insight into the gear bag of an A-List shooter.

Part II covers all sorts of lighting scenarios that Joe has been in where he has only used one single light. He talks about the many ways you can make one small light seem like a bigger light. Couple his detailed setup descriptions with his amazing images and you have a clear, complete, mutual understanding of how to re-create his setups. This is a springboard for your own shoot ideas and I have personally gotten a lot of inspiration from this book.

Part III expands on Part II and as you might have guess, now McNally’s using two (or more) lights. The content is more of the same, but now he’s building on the foundation he laid in Part II by adding and shooting with a second light source.

Part IV is where Joe really shows off. It’s titled “Lotsa Lights” and he writes about a setup in which he used 47 speedlights! This is the part of the book where you can see how Joe works down to the very smallest of details. This is the level in which we all strive for as photographers.

Throughout the book, McNally’s casual and straight-up style of writing kept me intrigued, smiling, laughing, and interested. I didn’t want to put down the book and I picked it up every chance I could until I had read it all. Joe doesn’t get too far into the weeds with tech talk, but instead explains the details in a simple and easy-to-understand method. He credits his ability to do this to his wife, Annie, whom he said kept him reeled in when it came to the technical details. Even the back of the book has a guide where Joe illustrates how to operate Nikon’s SB800 and SB900 flashes.

Not only does he talk about Nikon flashes and Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (CLS), but he also talks about lenses, light modifiers, grip gear, locations, models, and more. I really got the feeling that I was sitting and talking with him rather than reading a book.

In short, if you have any interest whatsoever in using small hot shoe flashes to light your subjects then you certainly should read this book. Now, Joe is a Nikon shooter and therefore everything in this book is about Nikon equipment. That’s not to say that the techniques don’t cross over, but you won’t see or read ANYTHING about the 5D MkII, a 580EX II, or an L Series lens. If you want to learn how to light like Joe McNally, read this book!

The image above was inspired by this book and it was a self-portrait that I created using 3 Nikon speedlights and a Nikon D90. It’s a lot easier than it may seem. The image below was from the perspective of where I was sitting when I took the shot. My youngest son Daniel wanted me to snap a shot of him, so here you go Danny!

I hope you have a great week and I’ll have the Lastolite Ezybox review up this week too!

Using Nikon Creative Lighting System: a.k.a “McNally-style”

If you have read my blog for any length of time you’ll know that I’m a big manual lighting kind of guy and I’m not much of the TTL, Creative Lighting System (CLS) type of Nikon shooter. I like the control I get with manual. Sure, it has it’s annoyances and may add a little extra time to your shoot but it puts the photographer in 100% control.

I’ve been reading Joe McNally’s new book “The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light From Small Flashes” and he talks an awful lot about CLS. And I mean an AWEFUL lot. So after reading it again and again, I decided to play around with it a bit.

CLS is great if you need to work fast and are running and gunning on a shoot. Why? Because you can shoot in Aperture Priority and the camera will meter the scene and tell your flashes what they need to output to get a proper exposure. You can further control your foreground to background ratio using exposure compensation. It’s also really convenient because if you’ve got a D70, D80, D90, D300, or D700 you don’t need to have a hot shoe flash as a Commander as you can use your pop-up flash.

CLS also has it’s limitations. The one that bothers me the most is the fact that the signal is line-of-sight (LOS) so your Commander unit has to be able to see your Remote flashes. Now, if you’re in a room with white walls the signal will bounce around a little, but not all that much. This is where radio triggers really shine because RF isn’t limited so much by LOS as infrared is.

In the shot above I put my SB800 on a lightstand with only the diffusion dome on. It was still pretty bright outside, so I beat down the California sun and got some saturation back in the sky my dialing in -1 EV (Exposure Compensation) and changing my camera’s white balance to Tungsten. This gave me a deep blue sky, but it makes EVERYTHING blue. So I put a full cut of CTO gel on my SB800 so it would warm up the light hitting my subject. Skin tones are nice and warm and my problem is solved. This was shot with my D90 at f8 1/100th ISO 200 @ 50mm with a Nikon 50mm f1.8 lens.

I call working this way “McNally Style” because it’s how he works with speedlights. It’s on a very rare occasion that he will shoot in Manual. He puts a lot of faith in Nikon CLS and rightfully so because he gets great results.

You can read more about Nikon CLS right here.