Portable Lighting - Tuesday, August 5, 2008 8:28 - 31 Comments

Using Your Small Strobes for Professional Results: Part One

As we begin to start to find some ways to use our speedlights – or small hotshoe style strobes – for advantage, we need to learn all about them. (Welcome Strobist Readers… thanks David.)

I’m not talking about the RTM stuff. Where to put the batteries and such. This tutorial already assumes you know a little about that stuff. What I am talking about is the unit itself… in regard to light.

Let’s establish a few ground rules for what we are going to be doing. First, this isn’t an ETTL, CLS, or any other kind of electronic exposure control in the flash unit. We are talking about manual settings. Manual is where the power is.

We also must make a few demands for the units themselves: They must have variable power, some way to fire them off camera (Sony strobe units are pretty proprietary I have seen) and they should have some sort of “Zoom” for the light. This last part isn’t mandatory, but it does offer some great flexibility.

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