High speed sync

Shooting a lot of wedding and portraits on location I am constantly battling the full day sun and trying to get creative with lighting during some of these harsh shooting conditions. One bummer about flash is that you normally end up shooting with a aperture that is f/8 or higher because of the shutter sync that most cameras have. Most SLR cameras have a shutter sync at around 1/200th of a second meaning that you have to shoot at 1/200 when using a flash. This means that during the daytime even when setting your ISO to 100 you are shooting with a very high aperture which might not let you create the shallow depth of field you would want for a portrait. Well there may finally be a solution to this problem! Pocketwizards new FlexTT5 system and Canon high speed sync. I saw these at the Pocketwizard booth this year at WPPI and didn’t have time to really look into them until recently, and have to say they do look pretty amazing. I have some on order right now through B&H so once they come in and I have some times to test them out i’ll post some extensive reviews here.

Do you use high speed sync in your photography? Let us know what you think about it in the comments below or add a few links to your shots!

In the meantime check out this really informative video that pocketwizard created. They give you some very good information about high speed sync and how it works and explains it in a very easy to understand format.

Here is a amazon link for the 580 flash they used in this demo along with the pocketwizards, these are the best buys I found on the web:

Canon Speedlite 580EX II

PocketWizard MiniTT1

Pocket Wizard FlexTT5 Transceiver