Using the Better Beamer Flash Extender

[Didereaux]

Have been trying this for a couple of months off and on. It takes some tweaking and experimenting, but looks to be a worthwhile addition for the type of shooting I do i.e. a lot of small birds in the bushes and bad lighting in general. First I use this with the flash set to high speed synch. This allows me to use shutter speeds necessary for these twitchy subjects 1/500+ and more often 1/1000 or more. This reduces the power(lumens) of the flash, but can't be helped. The extender is advertised to add +2 stops to your flash. definitely adds more than one. Another thing is that they recommend setting your flash at 50mm or less to avoid 'spot-lighting'. This I have found not necessary for shooting small subjects that you need to crop anyway. With the plus that setting your flash to longer mm extends the range quite a bit. Enough that it compensates for shooting with Hi-speed synch set. So here is the setup. I used for this shoot. Although this used a tri-pod, I have used the extender handheld with good results as well. All depends on circumstances.

the setup

the extender itself

and some quicky shots out the door early this morning. The extender allowed me to use 400 ISO @ ~1/640 instead of the default 3200 ISO without. So these things make a large improvement on the quality of the shots.

this shot shows the spot-lighting when using long mm on your flash...also the red-eye that occurs. To eliminate that you would need to move the flash quite a ways off the camera. By radio or cord. Distance was ~30'.