Photography: MacGuyver to the Rescue!

On Friday I finally received my Wein Peanut PND optical slave from Midwest Photo Exchange, and not completely to my surprise it did not fit in my strobe’s sync socket…  It turns out that SunPak strobes take an almost-standard 3/32 monoplug (which is several thousandths longer than a standard monoplug).  After purchasing a monoplug and finding out it didn’t work I tried manually tripping the flash by simply jamming a nail into the sync socket…  When the flash tripped I realized that the monoplug is simply too short.  My short-term solution:  Wrap most of the nail with label stock, and use two wires to connect the optical slave to the nail and the sync port’s sleeve.

It’s ugly, unstable and all-together sloppy, but it does work!  It reliably trips the strobe on my camera’s “main” flash, ignoring the preflash every time.  As I expected using an off-camera slave flash does improve the quality of my photos.  For demonstration purposes I decided to do some model photography.  Since I don’t have access to a proper model I decided to use my cat; Chessie.

Here is a picture of Chessie using only my camera’s internal (and very weak) flash. 

 

 

 

And a picture of Chessie using both the internal flash as a direct flash and the SunPak 522 Auto as a slave flash, bounced off the ceiling at 1/16 power.  This dual-flash picture is definately sharper, but I get the impression that my exposure compensation may be off…  After all I am only an amateur, and one inexperianced in multi-flash photograpry at that!  I will try to take more pictures tommorow, and both learn from my (inevitable) mistakes and post my best pictures then.  So until then…