wireless flash on the cheap
26 Jan 2007Following the instructions here, I decided to construct a cheap off-camera wireless flash to play with:
1 Vivitar 283 EX+ Thryistor Flash with Varipower Module: $43.00
1 RD616 Receiver and 1RF616 transmitter (check ebay): $26.90
1 Flash Hot-Shoe Tripod Adapter: $12.95
Total: $82.85
Not bad. I still need to get some velcro tape or something to secure the receiver to the flash head itself. There’s no E-TTL obviously, or anything, so the power, shutter-speed and aperture is really all guesswork, but I’m hoping it will still be fun to play with. I haven’t done much with it besides take pictures of it for this post:
Ball bungees. Cheap, light, and versatile. You can even use them to bungee the whole assembly to a pole if you need to without having to use the articulating arm.
You’d probably want to set your on-cam flash to M mode and use a spot meter. Helps with the guesswork, anyway. You just set the ISO and the flash sync speed, hold the meter at shooting position, and trigger the flash. It’ll tell you what aperture to select.
With the Vivitar flashes, too, you could have gotten away with a short Vivitar to PC adapter cord and a Wein peanut slave (one version of these, the PN-XL if memory serves, is supposed to be able to ignore pre-flash pulses, even – and Dury’s has them for pretty cheap).
One note on the hot-shoe adapter – put some electrical tape on the base of it if it’s made of metal. That X-terminal on the base of those Vivitar flashes can arc, and pretty soon you render your flash inoperable.