Bright Lights

It's not the newest idea at all, but the Strobist movement has definitely become very popular in recent years. Put simply, 'Strobist' is off-camera lighting. That's it. While there's no particular technique, per-se, most of it focuses (*cough*) around multiple strobes (flashes), modifying the way light falls and discussing solutions to challenging or interesting situations. Studio photographers have been doing stuff like this for years, with their big flash units and whatnot, but it's becoming more accessible nowadays given most portable high-end flashes are coming with built-in wireless communications systems - allowing their use outside of a studio - without needing to drag cables & generators around.

So that's pretty cool. Of course, "Speedlites", those 'accessible' flashes with the communication bits I referred to, cost upwards of $300 but usually closer to $500... which is as much as most hobbyist cameras cost! And to be totally honest with you, their communication kinda sucks. It's all infrared based, just like your TV remotes. Sure, dying batteries aside, TV remotes are pretty reliable - in your living room. Take your TV outside on a sunny day and see if your button presses keep working. Odds are they won't because the sensor/receiver in the TV is blinded by all sun. Speedlites suffer from this a lot... they also suffer from directionality issues, as all the components in the system have to be able to see the IR beam from each other. After a while of screwing around with unreliable IR communication, a budding Strobist is going to be casting about for some kind of flash trigger that doesn't suck.

And there's a plethora of RF (radio frequency) options out there, from the $30 "Poverty Wizards" (Cactus, PT-04, etc...) which are basically glorified garage-door opener remotes, to the $500/pr professional/industry standard Pocket Wizards. And about a year ago, I found myself doing this exact search.

Sticking to my 'poor people can't afford to buy cheap shirts' mentality, and after reading reviews & consulting with friends about the cheaper triggers, I decided I wasn't going to buy something that I'd likely want to upgrade (or smash into pieces) in short order. The cheapies were out.

Going high-end wasn't too appealing either: Pocket Wizards are used by most high-end photographers and are The Gold Standard for wireless triggers - from sports stadiums to portable setups. Unfortunately for me though, they're about $250 an end. 'Per End?' I hear you ask? That is, you need one unit on your camera to transmit the flash signal, and then a unit to receive the signal on each flash. I'm planning on having 3 flashes going, which means 4 units... a veritable Kilobuck. Plus cables and other attachment accessories. $1000? No thanks! I could buy a nice lens for that much, especially since we're broke from all the cash we invested in all of those Speedlites already.

A bit more research later, I found that there is a middle ground, namely the Elinchrom Skyports and the Alien Bees Cybersyncs. The latter held my attention for a few months since they were around $150 per-end and reviewed quite well, but I never actually ordered them... I wasn't completely sure if they were the best solution for me, and I was still not sure if the value was there for me at that price-point.

During all this slow-motion pondering, another brand kept getting mentioned, RadioPoppers, but every time I looked at their site, they were either teasing a new product or out of stock on it. It didn't help that the first time I went, I saw their Px system, which was around the $250 per-end price point again - so I wrote them off with the Pocket Wizards as just being too expensive for my needs.

In retrospect, I should've dug deeper... Later Pocket Wizard came out with a 'smart' system, which augmented the communications from the basic "Fire the flash now" message common to all units, to having the full smarts you'd get out of using Speedlights in infrared mode (namely power-control, but also allowing the camera to use it's smarts to automate the whole setup) - in short, they made the system smart and transparent to the camera's native smart-flash functions.

This was definitely cool. But still stupidly expensive. And it didn't help that Pocket Wizard's system wasn't working well with the Canon EX580 II Speedlites: the $500 flashes which I have a pair of. Write 'em off again.

But out there on the Internets, there was mumbling about this problem... "RadioPoppers don't have that problem." Huh?

It turns out RadioPoppers PX system I ignored earlier did exactly what the new Pocket Wizards do - but over a year earlier and without interference problems (ha! Just like the IR reliability problems all over again!) Okay, but I'm not really looking for 'smarty' functionality, because the camera's only really any good at automatically figuring out what I want when the flash is mounted on top of the camera, otherwise it does dumb things to the picture, ie: no dramatic lighting effects.

But let's give RadioPoppers a second look anyway, since they seem to have beat the big guys at their own game...

... Oh hey, what's this? A new RadioPoppers system at $90 per end? "JrX" eh? That looks cool. Dig dig dig. Buy!

The fine folks at RadioPopper had realized exactly the dilemma non-pro-but-really-serious-about-it photographers like me were going through: Cheap triggers just weren't good enough, and good triggers weren't cheap enough. So they set out in a non-compromising fashion to design and sell a high-quality-yet-affordable flash-trigger system. And they did it. And there's even a bonus feature: Not only do they provide a very reliable flash trigger signal, the JrX 'Studio' receiver unit also allows for power-control of the flash! This means one can control the intensity of up to 3 flashes (or 3 groups of flashes) from the transmitter unit on the camera. All this in an $80 receiver, using a $100 transmitter? Hot Damn! Not only is this cheaper than the similarly priced Cybersyncs - it's also more feature than just about everything else (other than the $250+ 'smarty' units.)

A big element of doing Strobist/off-camera flash photography is just simply controlling light. As I mentioned above, I don't want nor trust the camera's intelligence to actually do what I want. Manual power control is exactly what I want. And now I've got it.

Two flashes beyond me: one aimed at me, one pointed down the hall

And I like it.

One flash on the picnic table shooting through the fence towards the camera, another to the right lighting the front of me up

Unfortunately, since every camera manufacturer comes up with their own way to communicate with their flashes, RadioPoppers had to make a generic system, which couldn't directly interface with anything... But not before long, they also came out with brand-specific adapters so one can actually use the remote power-control feature with Speedlites (Canon) and Speedlights (Nikon). The "RPCubes" they called them. I ordered them within an hour of them being available.

My RPCubes arrived on a late-spring day, and I gleefully ripped them from their simple packaging, hooked 'em up, and hit the test-fire button. My flash emitted the slightest of blip of light. Cool! I cranked the power to full, hit the test-fire button again... and the flash emitted the slightest blip of light. Wait a sec...

Fast-forward a day, RadioPoppers were express-shipping me a new set of 'Cubes. Turns out there was a slight manufacturing defect with the first run. Oops.

A couple days later, I was in business, with full power control of my two Canon flashes. I have to say, it was pretty awesome, and they worked fantastically well. I was in love.

Okay, that's the two Canon flashes. I'd mentioned above that I was planning on using 3 flashes... but #3 wasn't a Canon, nor Nikon. It was a venerable Vivitar 285HV, a fairly 'mature' (read: old) design flash that cost me about $89 in 2003. It features... well, not much. Power-control is largely manual, although it has a small sensor which can vary the intensity somewhat, but it's not very practical nor reliable. In other words, it's straight-up dumb.

I said 'was'. It's not so dumb anymore...

Modified Vivitar 285HV with RadioPopper JrX Studio receiver and JrX Transmitter

More online research lead me to some documents that revealed how the manual power control on the Vivitars worked, and how simple it was to hack it to interface with the RadioPopper receiver. An hour later and some solder fumes, I had full power control over the 285 too!

For the next couple of weeks I went around extolling the virtues of the RadioPopper JrX system to anyone who showed even the slightest interest: an excellent price-point, highly-reliable system, affordable adapters & cables for interfacing with various flash units, opportunities for hacking old/disused flashes to work with the system. I really was in love.

And then while I was out shooting one evening with friends... it stopped working at all.

In my zeal and excitement, it appeared that I damaged one of the signal pins on the transmitter unit... it no longer connected to the camera's 'fire' signal. Ooops again.

And yet, a day later, RadioPoppers were apologetically shipping me a new transmitter - even though I broke mine! Now that's customer service!
But not only that, a week later, when they received my damaged unit - they refunded me all the shipping charges! Whaaaa? I haven't had customer service this good since Fujifilm swallowed a $400 repair job after they accidentally broke my camera (more) when I sent it in for repairs.

RadioPoppers kick ass. Not just the product, but the company and people behind it. These guys rock. You should buy their stuff.

There, I said it. 2 problems they fixed, but irregardless of that, the product is great.

Every silver-lining has a cloud though: It is a great little system, but not super durable. I managed to break the transmitter a second time... and I'll definitely blame myself for this one: I basically bashed off one of the power-control knobs sometime during the movie-shoot. (I used all 3 flashes to fill a large gymnasium so I could get crisp photos of a fast-moving game.)

Frankly, I'd feel too guilty to let them replace my transmitter again, even though I have a feeling they'd do it with a smile. So I opened up the unit, noted the model of the potentiometer I broke and ordered a replacement part off of Digikey.

My other complaint, again with the transmitter, is that it doesn't stay seated very well in the hot-shoe atop the camera... it tends to slide out quite easily. I've tried to mitigate this by using a Cap-Saver, but this is a poor solution, which isn't helped by the all the curved or textured surfaces that make for poor adhesive contacts. RadioPopper should add a loop or some sort of alternate attachment point so a photographer can mechanically tether it to their camera or strap - I can foresee myself losing the transmitter outright because of it.

Sabre Toothed Tiger - a bit of a colour issue, but otherwise nicely lit

In closing, these wireless flash triggers have definitely enabled me to control light in new & fun ways, and I look forward to working with them even more in the future! I highly recommend the JrX system to any budding Strobist. Given you can source the Vivitar flashes cheaply, the modifications are easy... it seems like a no-brainer to me now. So much so that I'm considering selling my Canon Speedlites and just getting more cheap flashes.

At the top of this (rather lengthy post) is a 'pull back' photo of the setup I used to produce the following image...

Click here for detailed notes on how I made this image