Self-self-self mirror portrait

Many of my friends has self-mirror portraits. I am not really into this, but when I saw the mirror in our room in Melide, I was totally fell in love with it. I immediately decided to do a "self-self-self mirror portrait":

The bathroom was very small, this mirror was in the middle. I put one flash (580 EX II) on the top of the mirror with a LumiQuest Softbox III as the main light, it was directed to my face and the camera. I think it was set to 1/32 power or something like that. I had my other two flashes (an 580 EX II and a 430 EX II) on the floor pointing upwards to the ceiling set to 1/64 power on my both sides. The lamp above the mirror gave just enough light to be able to focus with the camera, but other than that it was totally dark in the room. The triggering was done with the Cactus V4s, though I think infra would work, too. (In a small space, infra can bounce from the walls, and there is a big chance to hit the destination. Unfortunately outside it did not work for me).

Besides being dark and having hard time focusing, I had to bend when I did the shot, so that was very tiring. I was not really satisfied with the sharpness of the image, so later I even tried some shots with a tripod. Those photos were sharper, but I finally chose one for posting from the earlier ones. I had only a limited time for this experient, since it was pretty late, and next day we had to wake up early for the Swiss Miniatures (see here and here).

Group shot in Melide

Actually this was the first time I tried the Cactus V4s. We were very happy about a packed day with travel through the St. Gotthard tunnel, visiting Locarno, and a short walk in Melide, and we sat down in the garden of a the restaurant to eat something.

I brought two flashes with me (580 EX II), plus two triggers. I don't usually go to restaurant with full set of umbrellas and lightning equipment, so I needed to take a photo with this set, and since I had to wait a little bit for the food, I started to play with putting the flashes to different positions, and see what comes out.

After about 15 minutes of playing with the shooting angle and the adjustment of the flashes, this was the final photo:

The first flash was put just in front of the camera in the bench, hidden by the back of the bench, pointed directly to the group. The other flash was behind the second person on the right side, pointed to the roof, to give some fill from the top and some backlight also. I don't really remember the settings, but I think the front-flash was set up to the widest possible and about 1/4, and the back was set up to 1/2 and the narrowest possible.

I did not have any problems with the triggers, they did their job very well even when the flashes were not visible form the camera. Maybe that's because the flashes was not too far (2 and 4 meters), very much inside the 30 meter range, which was in the specification documentation of the transmitter.

Thank you for my friends to be so patient. :)

Cactus V4

I was very happy when I got the news about 3 weeks ago that I got a package. Then I was slightly disappointed when I found out that the package came from Hong-Kong. I expected it from the US. Then I was even more disappointed that the postman said that I have to pay 36 CHF for the customs and VAT. But then I did not worry about that for long, paid that, and seized the package!

I ordered one package of the transmitter and receiver, and two receivers separately.

I liked the boxing, they were pretty nice. The transmitter and receiver package contained the required batteries (not in the photo), a lot of cables, some manual and a small book with shots (not in the photo, because I forgot to put it there):

The receiver-only set contains the receiver only, plus one cable. This cable was a PC cable as far as I know, since it could drive my 580 EX II:

Close-up of the devices:

There is a button and the led on the transmitter, which is intended to test the receivers (and your ability for pressing a button on the transmitter). When the receiver is turned on and tuned to the same channel (there are 4 microswitches, which gives you 16 different channels), its led is flashing for the rhythm of your finger of the trasmitter button.

There is no switch on the transmitter, just on the receiver. The design department made a bad decision about the location of the switch: if a flash (at least my Canon 580 EX II) is mounted in the hot-shoe, you cannot access it. So when you care to preserve the batteries of the receiver for long, you either have to use the PC cable to connect the receiver to the flash, or you have to remove the flash after every session. I think I can live with that, since I almost always move, but tell me how much work it would take to put the switch in front of the receiver?

Another thing about the switch is that I always forget which one is the on, and which is the off position. I have to use the transmitter to test them always to make sure.

Besides these small problems, I could pretty easily use these devices, and I am very happy to have them. I'll post two more photos using them as triggers. I think they definitely worth their prize, if you don't need fancy TTL triggering, then it is a pretty cheap solution. They claim that the response time is between 1/1000 and 1/500 sec, which is pretty good in this category. If you don't need that sync speed, you probably can have an even cheaper solution (Ákos mentioned something for half prize).

Besides these triggers, I have one optical trigger also, so that if the battery set dies in one of them, I can probably use it as a backup trigger (I just have to make sure that that flash can see at least one of the others). Therefore I cannot say anything about the battery life yet, I did not overuse it in the last month, actually I am happy that I had some time to shoot with it a little bit.

Edit: I tag all posts with the cactusv4 tag, that has connection with the device (at least for a while until it is not interesting any more).