Using flash above 1/200
Recently while taking some drop photos, I wondered whether I could increase the shutter speed past 1/200. With high speed sync, I often took pictures at 1/250 and 1/300 – but I wanted to see if I could exceed it.
I had thought a bit about using a PocketWizard MultiMAX, but after reading through the manual and reading about others’ experiences, it doesn’t seem that it can get me much past 1/300. Therefore I came up with a rather simple idea that amazingly worked.
I setup my MT-24EX on my 180L and used it to trigger to 580EX flashes. The MT-24EX was set as the master and both 580EX flashes (actually one 580EX and one 580EX II) were set as slaves. I placed both 580EX flashes on the end of Wimberley macro brackets – which held the weight fine. I then set the MT-24EX to high speed sync.
The entire camera loaded thus was quite heavy and large. I suspect in the field it wouldn’t be too practical – though a monopod may help things. My goal was basically to blast the subject with light. Since I was watching the kids at home that day, I couldn’t go outside to try with a live drop so I hooked up the hose on the faucet with a rubber band.
In one respect, this shot was actually a mistake. I normally keep my ISO at automatic – but I had been taking some video the day before and therefore it was set to tungsten. When I switched to auto-ISO, I got the following shot.
The only real difference between the shots (other than a bit better focus on the first one) is white balance. In my opinion, the ‘mistake’ looks much better than the shot I normally would have gotten. Therefore I need to take note to try out different white balances on my RAW photos from time to time. Here, the tungsten white balance does a great effect on the water.
In terms of the result of my experiment, I was able to get shots at up to 1/2000 of a second by blasting the subject with light from the three flashes and four heads (the MT-24EX has two heads). I haven’t quite figured out how to use this in a more practical situation, but I’m happy to know that there is a relatively simple way to exceed 1/200 when I need it.
Note that this won’t help much with non-macro shots. The further you get the flash away the less effective it becomes. The main reason this approach seems to work here is that I blasted a rather small subject with a large amount of light.
As an aside, I found that leaving the faucet up with the rubber band attached makes a great joke. No one expects when they turn on the faucet to get sprayed!
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Tags: flash, high, macro, photography, speed, sync, water