Get Close!

Don't be afraid to get close with your lights. It makes controlling the light much easier.

I started this shot with a 50mm lens and a Ray Flash for fill, but at the 2+ metres away I had to be for a nice framing, the Ray Flash was pumping light everywhere, even to the back wall several metres away!

Switching to about 35mm, allowing me to get to about half the distance (and dropping the fill power down dramatically) cut the light from bouncing everywhere, and gave me a nice black background instead of showing the rest of the apartment.

PiXel Knight ETTL TR-332 final thoughts

Here's some final scattered thoughts on my (short) experience with the PiXeL Knight TR-332. I'm sending them back soon, without having given them a full test run because I just haven't had the time...

Range

Today I attended an Orbis workshop out at Canon in Sydney, so while there, I hooked up the TR-332 receiver/trigger combo and a 580EXII with Orbis. Took about 10 shots, doing a quick range test on the system... all shots were fine until we got past about 80m. Quite a usable range (see the pic on the right).

High Speed Sync

I have not been able to get a non-Canon flash to sync above 1/250th (my max sync speed). The triggers quite happily let me go up to 1/8000th with an SB-26, but it only illuminated a small strip of the shot (as expected), even at 1/320th I was missing part of the shot. The upside is they will still let you try :)

Interestingly, when I put the SB-26 into slave mode, beyond 1/250th, it didn't even show up in part of the shot. But on the TR-332, it partially lit the shot, depending on how far beyond 1/250th I went.

HSS with the 580EXII is fine. I had one shot where the camera switched back to 1/250th, but out of hundreds of other shots, no problem.

Reliability

The reliability issues I encountered seemed to disappear when I used the OC-E3 cords and also when I put the receivers into different groups (as suggested on another thread), but I didn't have a chance to test in different groups 'in the wild'.

User Interface
The UI is not great, with only two buttons on the trigger and the receivers, the buttons are quite overloaded, so you have to hold for 2 seconds to power on/off, and to get into the menus.

The other thing that annoys me is that I can't control the flash power from the in-camera menu, I have to set it on the trigger. But I CAN set it from the trigger, it's just not as user-friendly as the in-camera menu.

Other stuff
When in ETTL, compared to an ST-E2, they do seem to overexpose more often. Not always in my tests, but often, especially with darker subjects. FEC to -2 seemed to fix this up.

I hooked up the ST-E2 to the receiver, and was able to trigger the 580EXIIs via TR-322 -> ST-E2 -> 580EXIIs, but I lost the ability to control the ratios. That is to say, when I set the ST-E2 to 8:1 and put it on camera, I got an 8:1. When I put the ST-E2 on the receiver, and the trigger on my camera, then I got a 1:1, not an 8:1.

Overall
I liked them. Being able to do HSS and ETTL over radio is nice, but because I'd still be reaching for the ST-E2 and/or OC-E3 cord in a lot of cases, personally, I wouldn't buy them - because I already have an ST-E2 and an OC-E3 cord.

If I didn't have those, I'd definitely consider them.

PiXeL Knight ETTL TR-332 do macro

Knights
After having some troubles with reliability on my first real test, I decided to hook up the 580EXII flashes via OC-E3 (off camera cord) to the TR-332s...

It's well known that with the PocketWizard TTL range, 580EXIIs have issues due to interference (from the flashes themselves), and I was having enough trouble with the TR-332s to warrant trying something else...

No extremes this time, just f/8, 1/100th, ETTL, 2 flashes.

What can I say? They performed admirably. The shots looked just as they would have with an ST-E2 on the camera.


Shot notes
These were all simple A4 white paper 'macro studio' shots. With an A4 sheet underneath, one more on top, and one in front, to the right to bounce a bit more light back.

Flashes are on either side to get nice highlights down the sides.

Nothing fancy...

PiXeL Knight ETTL Triggers First impressions

Elvis aka elv0000 was kind enough to pass on a set of the new PiXeL Knight ETTL triggers for me to give them a test run, which I finally got around to over the Easter long weekend.

Build
These seem very professional and built fairly well. They come with a nice plastic cover over the screens so they arrive shiny and unscratched. A metal hot-shoe on the trigger, and a nice weight makes them seem tough.

Reliability
With a single flash hooked up, they have been perfect.

On a limited test run (11 shots) with 2x580EXIIs hooked up and synching at 1/8000th, I got about 80% reliability - in one case, only one of the flashes fired, and I had one case where the HSS didn't work - it dropped to 1/250th, and one case where at 1/8000th I got half the frame lit, half not.

I consider 1/8000th to be an extreme test case, and I'm still impressed by the fact the triggers could DO that!

Functionality

ETTL support works well, no need to adjust the flashes when changing apertures or shutter speed. Easy. When the flashes were connected to the triggers they showed 'TTL', once the camera was switched on, they flicked to 'ETTL' - they recognized the camera was connected.

High Speed Sync support works well (apart from the extreme case mentioned above).
The Z3 photo was taken at 1/400th, with no issues, just ETTL and press the trigger.

More tests to come to test further functionality, so far I've only done ETTL with HSS in every case :)

Wedding DIY

Got married recently. Decided to do a bit of our own photography, and just use a pro for the ceremony, and some shots afterwards.

That meant things like the make-up, bouquet, all those 'behind the scenes' sort of shots were up to me.

We got married in Hawaii, which meant, I had to use the gear I could carry on a plane. No worries, if anything, strobist has taught us to pack light (not that I usually do), and use what's available.


Enter, the DIY studio...

A fairly simple setup, with a double 580EXII through a brolley, using a reflector for fill, and a cool DIY glass+coffee cup bouquet holder.

Why a double 580EXII? Because I had them already set up on the stand that way, and it seems to give a slightly better light spread.

Why the umbrella slightly collapsed? Because of where I needed to put the camera. At that sort of distance, the light source is still big enough to be soft.

The real gem here was using the towels.

By getting the camera to bouquet to towel distances right, to match the aperture... the towels blur out nicely, so you don't pick up the rough detail on them, and they become a nice, draped background, reminiscent of a wedding dress, without having to try and work out how to hang the wedding dress above a TV!

Oh yeah, and that's a light stand under the tall towel...