strobe flash?

WTF? · Apr 18, 2008

hey there, forgive me for being a bit of a noob but i have a quick question on flashes.
at the end of the year ill be getting a canon 40D, so i can get into photography properly. i mainly want to get into skate(boarding) photography, and ive had this plan for a photo in my head for a while. its pretty much just a photo with a long exposure of any skating trick in particular preferably at night with a little side lighting and then with like a flash that goes of repeatedly throughout the duration of the exposure to highlight still portions of the trick, so its effectively a sequence shot but in the one frame, and with the blurring from the low light on the skater between the stills.

i should be getting a flash anyway, so my question is, is there any sort of flash that can do like a continuous shooting mode? or does this come standard with most flashes? (if so, good!)
i know pretty much nothing about flashes, apart from the nikon ones are usually called SB- (number) and the canon ones are called speedlites.

any help would be GREATLY appreciated, and anyone who helps will recieve an e-thumbs up from me.

ps. on the note of flashes, to have a flash not mounted in the hot shoe, do i have to have one of those radio things to set them off? or are those just for outside a certain range or something? i really have no idea about how all this flash business works, haha

Village Idiot · Apr 18, 2008

They're all speed lights.

I don't think that a speed light would work. You'd need a studio strobe. Most speed lights, even with an external battery pack, still take 3-4 seconds to recharge to full. For a trick that last maybe 4 seconds, you're not going to be able to get it, even at a lower power with less recharge time.

Studio strobes recharge about 1 second to full power. I think at a lower power it may be less.

You'd have to set the camera and then manually fire your strobe through out the exposure.

Socrates · Apr 18, 2008

Village Idiot said:
They're all speed lights.

I don't think that a speed light would work. You'd need a studio strobe. Most speed lights, even with an external battery pack, still take 3-4 seconds to recharge to full. For a trick that last maybe 4 seconds, you're not going to be able to get it, even at a lower power with less recharge time.

Studio strobes recharge about 1 second to full power. I think at a lower power it may be less.

You'd have to set the camera and then manually fire your strobe through out the exposure.

Nikon's SB-600 will do it. I've never used that feature but I expect that the flash intensity is drastically limited.

Village Idiot · Apr 18, 2008

Socrates said:
Nikon's SB-600 will do it. I've never used that feature but I expect that the flash intensity is drastically limited.

It's an option similar to high speed sync. Canon will do the same as well, but like you speculated, the intensity goes down the toilet.

And the way it works, iirc, is that it fires every time the camera does, which is not what he was talking about. He could make a composite image of course, but it wouldn't quite be the same. He wouldn't get the ghosting between the flash exposures.