The Arrival of the Cactus V4s (+ my new photo wall)

Posted on: 5 January 2010

That's right! After five weeks of waiting, my Cactus V4 wireless triggers have finally arrived. I ordered them back in November, in the hope that they would simplify the whole off-camera flash process and thus make it more fun. Up until now I've been restricted to a coiled TTL cable, which meant I couldn’t be much further than a metre away from the flash, which was somewhat limiting. But now - fingers crossed - that’ll be a thing of the past.

In the follow-up to my blog back in September about printing your photos, to show I'm not a hypocrite, I decided to capture a snap of my new photo wall. And since the wireless triggers arrived today, I thought I'd have a bit of fun with them. Exhibit A:

I love shooting with these little things. They make things so much easier. In the image above I set the camera to Tungsten (blue) white balance, which obviously turns the whole scene blue. Then, to turn the subject (me) back to a normal colour, I gelled the flash with a full CTO (orange) gel. The SB-600 flash was set to 1/2 power and bouncing into an umbrella, fired with the Cactus V4. For the back light, I set my Jessops 360AFD flash on its stand and pointed it towards the wall, at 1/16th power. The Jessops flash has an optical slave mode, which means it’s triggered by the other flash and therefore didn’t need a wireless receiver (just as well as I only have one at the moment). I gelled the background flash with a 1/4 CTO gel, just to make the light hitting the wall slightly less blue.

I’m pretty pleased with how the picture turned out, and it shows what can be easily achieved in a short space of time with a couple of flashes and a bit of creative thinking. I must say, Joe McNally’s book ‘The Hot Shoe Diaries’ is a great read and has heavily influenced my interest in off-camera lighting.