I am on vacation for the week and have been trying to take care of a few things that I have been putting off until I had "some time" to do them. As we all know that time never comes but organization is the theme for today.
After playing witht the RadioPopper JrX's for a couple minutes I was immediately impressed by being able to flash sync a Canon 1D, Canon 550EX flash and Nikon SB26 flash at over 1/1000 of second with the flashes at 1/8 power. I was able to go up to 1/1250th without seeing any cut off of flash in the frames on the camera screen. Above that shuter speed I could see the flashes were not syncing.
Comparing them to the ebay remotes I was using, they would sync at a maximum of 1/500 but I would lose just a hair of light at either the top or the bottom of the frame. i cannot remember which. Usually this was an acceptable loss and not all that noticable in the finished photograph. On the other hand if the batteries were running low then getting them to sync at that shutter speed involved a couple of satanic rituals or just dropping to 1/400. Not wishing to owe my soul to the devil I usually opted to just drop my shutter speed to 1/400.
And as far as reliability, the ebay remotes required deep prayer and devine hope. Invariably they always stopped working at some point in time and I would have to readjust myself an inch to the left right or not shoot vertically or move the receiver because I found a dead zone where the transmitter and receiver wouldn't talk.
Pocket Wizards were the exact opposite of the ebay remotes. I wasn't able to go above 1/500 without seeing some drop off light in the frame, but the wizards were more reliable than the sun coming up everyday. That is unless there was a user error like forgetting to put batteries in them.
I'm hoping the JrX's will be as reliable.
As promised in the video I uploaded 2 photos to flickr from what I took with the RadioPopper JrX's after first trying them.
One note of dissapointment, shortly after making this video I hooked up one of the JrX receivers with a remote cord to the Canon 1D and the other receiver remained attached to the Nikon SB26. Firing the transmitter manual, I could not get them to sync at even 1/60 of second. I didn't drop the shutter speed any slower figuring it was futile. It appears the flash is firing off before the shutter is opening on the camera. I'm dissappointed in this, but this is not my initial intended use for the JrX's.
I have only had 1 instance that I can remember in the past few years where I have wanted to use a remote to fire a strobe and the camera. I was placing a camera inside a locker and firing off a strobe to light the subject who was involved in an anti-bullying campaign at a local high school. At the time, I resolved the problem by setting the camera on its 10 second timer and just pushed the shutter button and had the subject watch for the flashing red light on the camera. It worked, but it would have worked better to have a remote control for both flash and camera.
There maybe a setting I can change on the RadioPopper JrX's to get them to sync, but I'm not sure. I will probably write RadioPopper and see what they say.
I follow up soon with my impressions of the JrX once I use them on a few assignments.
By the way, I bought the camera remote cord and the hot sync cords at www.flashzebra.com. I put my order in on Friday for the cords and had them Monday. I had never used them before that, but they had good prices on the cords compared to some other places. I have been quite happy with them. If you need flash gear please check them out.
An unboxing of the RadioPopper JrX's that I purchased. These were released for sale August 20th. I received my set of 2 receivers and 1 transmitter JrX's 1 week and a day later. These are the JrX Studios.
These are replacing the ebay cheapo flash sync that I mentioned in a previous post. I will let you know of my first impressions soon.
I thought I'd pass on some info in case anyone using Drupal 6 is trying to do something similar which I just wrestled with.
I'm developing a revision to this site and in updating my site's look I decided to change some of the columns and add a region. Just for some basic info, I've moved both default sidebars to the right of the content area and created a new region called "above_sidebars" that is the combined width of the sidebars.
I quickly realized when neither of the sidebars were displayed the content region would change from 560px wide to 960px. This width change was coming from the CSS markup for ".no-sidebars #content" in the styles.css file. I couldn't just change the width setting because I needed to be able to remove all sidebars and including my new above_sidebars and allow the content to run the full width of the site.
The CSS class ".no-sidebars" was being inserted in the body statement for the page.
These CSS classes "front", "page-node", "no-sidebars", and "lightbox-processed" added by a page creation variable in Drupal 6 that originated in the Zen theme in Drupal 5. It allows pages to be dynamically themed without having to place tons of conditional statements in their page.tpl.php or other theme pages. Instead the information is worked out in the Drupal code. The name of the variable used to print out the CSS classes may vary based on your theme. Mine is $body_classes. ... [Read More]
