Flash trigger help? Professional photogs please?

Ho,

I've seen videos on YouTube people using flashes for hi speed photography etc.

And I was wondering, how do they trigger them all off? I'm not really sure.

I've got a Nikon d5100 and if someone could tell me what flash is good for high speed photography etc. That'll be great.

There are different ways to trigger cameras, sound, motion or light are a few ways. It helps to have the proper lighting equipment which gives you a very short flash duration and freezes the action.

You attach a transmitter to the hot shoe of the camera and receivers to the speed lights. When you press the shutter, the transmitter sends out a radio signal to the receivers which tells them to fire the flash. You can set multiple receivers on the same channel as the transmitter and fire several flashes at once.

A nice non-pricey flashgun that I'd recommend to you would be a Yongnuo YN-560. As for the triggers, try something cheap. You can find triggers for about $20. They're not top-notch, but they do the job and they do it well.

In so-called 'high speed photography of the type you describe, it is the flash burst that freezes motion, NOT the shutter speed. In fact, the shutter speed has to be kept below the max sync speed for flash (usually around 1/200 sec or less).

The best most reliable way to trigger lots of flashes is to use radio triggers. I use RF602's from Yongnuo (about £20 a set). The transmitter sits on the camera's hotshoe & the receiver attaches to the flash 'foot'. You can have a receiver for each flash you use, or if the flash has an 'optical slave' mode then triggering one flash by radio trigger will cause the others to go off via optical triggering (they go off when they 'see' another flash occur).

The Yongnuo YN560 flash is a good cheap manual flash - about £50.

This is a Strobist swim shoot I did using RF602 trigger and 2x YN560 flashes;

and these are some still images from my photostream showing the use of off camera flash;