Stephen Eastwood|Beauty and Fashion Photographer

Firing Strobes with a Point and shoot Digital Camera

Q. How can I use my point and shoot digital camera with other lights like strobes, or speedlights or vivitars that you often talk about? Especially if I do not have a hotshoe on my camera?

This only works if your camera can be set to full manual control. Must be able to set the cameras iso, shutter and aperture simultaneously.

OK, you need a setup, if you are planning on going wireless you need radio slaves or pocket wizards, or any cheap ebay radio slave system they work juts have a limited range which is most often way more than most woudl ever need to be away from the lights its firing.

Those mainly have hotshoe or pc connectors, so this woudl be perfect for a point and shoot without a hotshoe

http://www.adorama.com/SUDCFA.html?sear … ;item_no=1

you than plug in a hot shoe flash like a vivitar or a radio slave and this will see the point and shoot preflash, ignore it and fire the radio on the main flash. This also allows the use of a hotshoe flash right off the camera for a run around situation.

If you plan to wire your strobes directly than you woudl need a hotshoe to pc adapter or just get a digital pc slave instead of the above. Here is a hotshoe to pc adapter

http://www.adorama.com/FAHSPCA.html?sea … item_no=11

to that you woudl plug in a pc cord to the strobes. Of course this means that you woudl need a digital pc slave for each separate strobe since the flash would fire the strobe if any are set to optical slave. The radio way you need one transmitter to the one slave unit above and than a receiver for each strobe.

This only works if you are using a camera that can be set to full manual control of ISO, Shutter and Aperture at the same time, not one at a time.

If you want to bipass the above two piece setup and direct optical each to a pc sync cord you can use this
http://www.adorama.com/WNPND1.html?sear … item_no=31

It actually is more than the two pieces above but does not require batteries, it wont allow the use of a hotshoe flash without a pc in and you can't use it to mount a hotshoe next to your P&S.

Also, if you are mounting them to use a hotshoe next to the camera you may want to stick a piece of aluminum foil over the flash to direct it toward the side flash but more importantly to stop it from influencing the shot. Do not block the camera flash completely the slave needs to see it, the main area you are shooting does and should not see it if you can avoid it.

None of this is needed if you have a hotshoe on the camera like the G9.

The GN 18 on-camera flash on most P&S cameras probably won't do much to the overall exposure.

If you do have a hot-shoe, you could also use a cheap, low power on-camera flash aimed at the ceiling to fire regular slaves - saving you the cost of the digital slave peanuts.

DSLR on camera flashes can also fire pre-flashes as well, though they all have hot shoes that will accept a dumb flash. I think most dSLR users prefer RF control to optical slaves though.

Digital slrs can be set to manual and no preflash so it means you can use the oncamera to fire slaves, the point and shoots cannot work that way always, the G9 can as well, if you set it to manual and the flash can be turned very low to only influence the slave that is firing everything.

And for my work firing a light at a ceiling woudl give a low fill and kill the blacks on over sensitive digitals, so I woudl prefer to avoid having a bounce and stick to only what lights I am using, also that may not work well outside, the above way will work anywhere so it becomes a reliable way to use it with repeatable predictable results short of equipment malfunctions.

And a guide number of 18 on a camera with only a 105mm lens means it will be pretty bright if I was shooting a tight headshot, I would not want it impacting my image at all. My shots above were at a 210mm equivalent which is long for most point and shoots out now, I wish it were longer as I find it a bit short for me