Making My Flash A Slave
Posted on 12 February 2010
Yesterday I mentioned that you can add a hotshoe adapter to an SB-600 to give it a flash sync port. Well, if you want your inexpensive flash to be able to work as a flash activated strobe, there’s one more add-on. When you make a flash work in slave mode, you can’t use any flash system that uses a preflash. In other words, if you’re using a camera that triggers other flashes with a strobe preflash, a “dumb” slave flash will fire when the first preflash fires, before the primary flash fires, and it won’t be able to fire the split second later when needed. Therefore you need to be using a primary strobe that doesn’t preflash, like a studio strobe.
There are some hotshoe adapters that, by themselves, can fire a flash. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t find one that was compatible with my SB-600. But the good news is that, using the flash sync cable hotshoe adapter I mentioned yesterday, I can use a $12 flash slave adapter that plugs into a flash sync port. That does work. Where’d I get it?… Flash Zebra of course.
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4 responses to Making My Flash A Slave
Larry,
Good call…
I bought both of these items from Flash Zebra some time ago to use my SB-600 as a hair/background light with my studio strobes. Works like a champ!
CL
I ordered both of these items also. I am still alittle lost as I haven’t used my SB-600 as a slave before. Do i need to put anything on my hot shoe adapter on my camera to make this work or will using the on camera flash trigger the slave?
Thanks.
Where can I get more info about how to set up a remote system with my nikon (d-80) and my sb-6oo I saw the recent d-town clip, Is there more info?? DG
[...] time ago I wrote about my SB600 and some attachments to make them into a slave flash. I never really explained why someone might want to do that and I also realized that, while my [...]