[caradoc]

A few more from this season:

[caradoc]

You do. f/8 is pretty average for most of my shooting. At f/16 you lose a lot of the “leaders” and tendrils.

I’ve occasionally had to open to f/2.8 when the storms is very distant.

[caradoc]

More fun with the lightning trigger.

[caradoc]

Daaaamn, but this thing is fun to play with.

The triggering strike is actually the one farther to the right. The closer strike to the left just happened to occur while the shutter was still open for the exposure, so it’s got all of the “leaders” there…

[caradoc]

I’m thinking about retooling it so it can be a little more versatile – shouldn’t be difficult to make it motion sensitive (motion detectors use IR) and possibly sound sensitive.

He’s already got a later version of something he calls a “Camera Axe” with additional triggers, very controllable. Can fire camera or flashes based on sensor input.

[caradoc]

Those daylight shots are damn cool.

Thank you very much. Since our monsoon storms are in full swing here in the Phoenix area, expect to see a lot more of them… I still need to do the endurance tests on the trigger to see how long the battery lasts.

[caradoc]

Hey….I saw this post on the Flickr Strobist group. Didn’t know you were a Farktographer as well.

Oh, and nice stuff!

Thanks! And I didn’t know you were in the Flickr Strobist group – do you use a different user ID over there?

[caradoc]

Now I realize that two or three minutes can be catastrophic for some people, such as wedding photographers, but shouldn’t they have an extra body and flash anyway?

Yep. The two guys I’ve heard the most complaints from about the SB-900 are wedding photographers in Arizona.

Not exactly temperature-friendly for the flash.

[caradoc]

For off-camera work I use studio strobes.

I use studio strobes in the studio, or in locations where I’m not having to carry gear a few miles to get to the location.

In remote locations, any hot-shoe flash can be better than no additional light at all. Heck, even one reflector can make a huge difference.

The cool part about the D80 (and the D90, D200, D300, or D700) is that if you’ve got one, and any of the currently-sold Nikon flashes like the SB-600, the recently-discontinued SB-800, or the “made of awesome” SB-900 (just don’t depend on it in fast-moving situations because it’s got a reputation for overheating and shutting down at the worst possible moment), you’ve got on-location off-camera strobes, remotely controllable from the camera’s pop-up flash in manual mode or TTL.

They just *work*.

[caradoc]

Nice!

[caradoc]

Learn to use the SB-600 off-camera.

If you go to Custom Menu Setting #22 on the D80, you can change the behavior of the pop-up flash to make it remotely control other Nikon flashes.

One SB-800 to camera right in a bounce umbrella outdoors:

Two SB-800s left and right in shoot-through umbrellas:

Both images were taken using a D80 with the pop-up flash as my Commander for the remote flashes.

(I’m in the middle of a project to make an instructional DVD for exactly that…)

[caradoc]

@jpatten – the other advantage you’ll find is that most battery-powered flashes have shorter flash durations at lower power levels, which makes it a lot easier to “freeze” motion.

Most dSLRs can’t actually “freeze” motion with high shutter speeds. You end up with shear as the slit transits the sensor. FP Sync (Nikon) or “High Speed Sync/HSS” (Canon) just exacerbate the problem as demonstrated here

[caradoc]

Can I get a judgement call on “blurry?”

What about something like this?

[caradoc]

FSM seems to be horribly b0rk3d at the moment. Throwing consistent Status 500.

javax.servlet.ServletException: Could not get JDBC Connection; nested exception is com.mysql.jdbc.CommunicationsException: Communications link failure due to underlying exception:

** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **

java.net.SocketException
MESSAGE: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect

[caradoc]

I haven’t had any issues with Flickr flagging me as “unsafe,” but that’s probably because I’m anal-retentive about flagging my own images very conservatively as “moderate” or “restricted.”

They’ve been known to flag entire accounts as “unsafe” when people haven’t been setting the appropriate flags.

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