How to Trigger Flashes on Professional Cameras

Video Transcript

"I wanted to tell you a couple of different ways that you can trigger your flash. Now this particular flash fits right on to my Cannon and it is also a Cannon so it is made to work really well with it and it can just slide right on there, this flash is triggered when you press the shutter speed as long as you have got the flash turned on. However if you were using an L-bracket like this, this would actually attach to the bottom of the camera and then you have got a flash up here but you still need to connect your flash to your camera and the way that I do that is with this hot-shoe adapter, the hot-shoe adapter connects to the hot-shoe on your camera and also makes the same connection on the bottom of your flash so that only works if your flash is at a very close distance to your camera. What if your flash is even further away? In that case you are going to need a synch cord and this cord will run all the way to the PCM port on your flash from your camera and as you can see this is a pretty long synch cord. The third way and the way that you have the most latitude is with these things called a Pocket Wizard, now they sell these in, you don't have to buy the Pocket Wizard, the Pocket Wizard is probably, you know the most well known of the brands and also probably the most expensive, so you can go online and find different transmitters that are a lot less. Each one of these transceivers is about two hundred apiece and you need one for your camera and then an additional one for each flash that you have. So if you can find some of the more affordable transceivers, sometimes the less expensive ones actually have a transmitter and a receiver where these, you know they can be either one, but a lot of times you can get away with that, especially if you are not trying to transmit far distances. Where these really come in handy is if you are doing something portable, like for example I just shot a wedding on a beach, so I had one Pocket Wizard attached to this camera and then I used my small strobe on a stand with an umbrella light a few feet away from me and it worked great because I didn't have any cords for anyone to trip on and I was able to fire my flash. These also work through walls so if you are trying to do a very intricate setup you could fire your flash remotely using your Pocket Wizard and if I wanted to do a self-portrait I could actually have one connected to my camera and fire the camera remotely or one connected to the strobe and the camera on the self-timer and fire that way. So there are a lot of different ways that you can trigger your flashes and they can be beneficial depending on your exposure or if you are trying to create a certain effect."