Flash Sync At 1/320 With The Nikon D7000

 

Most modern SLR Camera bodies have a flash sync speed limit of one 200th or 1/250th of a second. Of course, using high-speed sync, which is available on both Canon and Nikon bodies, you can synchronize at whatever shutter speed you like... sort of. The price you pay for the privilege of higher sync speed is a substantial loss in flash power. That is because it does the continuous, low power flashy thing repeatedly as the shutter moves across the image plane. Instead of getting one nice big pop of power from the flash, you get a whole bunch of little weak pops of power. That is okay if you are shooting something indoors or in the evening, but not great if you are shooting someone outside at noon. I will confess that if you use bare flash close enough to your subject in full sun on high-speed sync you can get some decent results. But, put a standard modifier like an umbrella in front of, let's say, three of those expensive flashes you own and let me know if you are able to overpower the sun. Not likely.


Why does this matter? Well, what most "people" photographers want to accomplish is to make their subject stand out from the background. An excellent way of doing this is to darken the surroundings including the sky, if there is a sky in the picture. It just looks cooler, the client loves it and it is a look that screams professional.
Notice the photograph below. I do not usually do weddings but this day was an exception. And of course, they had to have a picture on this fence at 12:30 PM. Oh well, time to pull out a few extra flashes.

This image shot on D7000 with off-camera flash @ F11 and 1/400th of a second shutter.

I used a wide-angle lens in this photograph. I was standing about 8 feet away from my subjects. As a key light, I used three 1/4 CTO gelled Lumopro LP160 Speedlight's at full power on a light stand behind a shoot through umbrella. (keep in mind that both the umbrella and the gels take away power from your flashes.) The light stand was about 8 feet from my subjects. To trigger my flash I connected a Cybersync radio trigger CSRB (same thing as a PocketWizard) to one of the flashes on the stand.  The other two flashes are slaved. On the opposite side, I had one LP 160 at full power as fill. By the way, the Lumopro LP 160 has one of the most sensitive optical slaves I've ever seen on any flash. And for the price, I can buy about three of them for the price of one SB-900. They are an excellent manual flash, very easy to use and have a decent recycling time of only 4 seconds at full power. I usually try to stay at one half power or below when I shoot, but this time I needed more umph.

Here is the setup for the above shot.

 I always shoot this kind of thing in manual mode on whatever camera I'm using. This time it was  a D7000. I set the aperture at f/11 and my shutter speed to 1/400th of a second. How could I be at f/11 if it was 12:30 in the afternoon? What you can't see in the picture is that I was taking advantage of a tiny bit of shade that the palm tree was providing. Had there been direct sunlight hitting their heads, I would've added one more flash to my key and maybe would have moved the light a bit closer. "But how could you have the camera set at 1/400th of a second with flash? The D7000 only syncs up to 1/250th" you say. That's true if you have a Nikon flash connected to the hot shoe and you're not using high-speed sync. However, when using a wireless radio trigger such as the Cybersync and off-camera flash, it syncs at 1/320th of a second with no hint of the curtain in the frame! Nice! How was I able to get 1/400th of a second on this shot with no black curtain at the bottom of the frame? Notice that the ambient light is very strong at the bottom of the picture on the concrete. The ambient matched my flash output.

The setup for the bride and groom only took about five minutes lights and all.

Notice that Manfrotto 175 Justin clamps that I'm using. If you don't have any, you should get four or five. you won't know how you survived without them!