Nikon Commander Mode Question

[manaheim]

So I was just horsing around with my SB-800 off-camera and doing a bit of an experiment.

I was under the impression that the flashes had to be within line of sight from the camera to operate, but I wondered if perhaps the flash would work as long as it was able to see the light coming from the flash on the D300... and it appears that it does. I was able to stick the flash behind a variety of things, including some pretty dark corners, and it still seemed to work without a hitch.

Am I losing my mind, or is this actually a viable way to do it? If so, it makes the wireless without radio triggers thing reasonably viable in a lot of circumstances, which is really cool.

 

[goodoneian]

i think that commander mode works pretty good for indoor situations like you described since as long as the slave flash sees the light it'll fire. i've stuck mine in weird places all around my house before i had triggers and it worked pretty good. i prefer cls for some indoor situations since you can adjust the output on the camera rather than on the flash itself. it's a shame how much the range diminshes once you go outside though in my experiences atleast

 

[JerryPH]

It is very viable under many circumstances. I enjoy CLS a lot, however it does have limitations that can be exceeded when going wireless trigger and a full manual setup.''

Any time you place the engineering control in the hands of some unknown little Japanese man, you are going to face compromises and differences in methods of working and desired results.

 

[jlykins]

I really like the CLS system. I have a friend that has wireless transmitters that work with CLS. It places an infared reciever/admitter over the one on the master and the slave and will work without even being able to "see" the flash. I'll have to get the name of the unit and get back to you guys. We used it at a recent wedding and it worked perfect.

 

[manaheim]

I guess I don't know what CLS is. I know what TTL is, I think.

I need to look it up.

I find it amazing that the theoretically simple addition of a flash opens up a complete pandora's box of new technical issues you have to focus on.

 

[jlykins]

Creative Lighting System. It allows you to dial in your flash settings from your camera. It also allows a lot of other options as in delaying one flash while "poping" another at normal time. I'm sure there are a lot of other things that it does that I don't know about, but that's just one of them.

 

[jlykins]

I just talked to my buddy, the name of the system is Radio popper. They can be found here: http://shop.radiopopper.com/radiopopperp1.aspx

 

[Lyncca]

I'm pretty basic in my lighting setup so far, and this is all I use. When I can save up enough money, I will purchase a studio set, but for now, this works great, especially since most of my stuff is shot on location.

 

[JerryPH]

I really like the CLS system. I have a friend that has wireless transmitters that work with CLS. It places an infared reciever/admitter over the one on the master and the slave and will work without even being able to "see" the flash. I'll have to get the name of the unit and get back to you guys. We used it at a recent wedding and it worked perfect.

Radio Poppers.

http://www.radiopopper.com/