Mixing Strobes with SB-800s

[spritestress]

Weather permitting, I am doing an architectural shoot tomorrow, of a large house

at an amazing setting, shot at dawn and then again near dusk. I plan to use a

set of Bowens strobes on Travel-Paks, and some additional lights. However, I

would like to try something I haven't done before, which is to attach a

Pocketwizard to a Nikon SB-800 in master mode, and combine that with other

SB-800s around the area. Have you tried this? What, if any hassles, might you

have encountered with this setup? I am supposing that there will as many as

eight lights on radio trigger. Have you encountered distance and/or line of

sight problems with the slave SB-800s triggered in cascade by the master SB-800

receiving its signal from the Pocketwizard?

[Matt Laur]

If you use the SB-800 in SU4 mode, it will fire whenever is sees another strobe go off. As long as the sensor on an SB-800 can see another strobe, you should be OK. Nikon's CLS won't work in this situaiton, but then, it doesn't really need to.

[spritestress]

I need CLS mode triggering for the slave SB-800s, to set specific manual output levels using groups A,B,C. They will be scattered around the grounds to light foliage, and things not lit by the home's own exterior spots and sconces. My setup efforts before dawn should provide the experience and experiment results I'll need. If all else fails, it will be more pocketwizards to the rescue. Also, the camera is Canon, but their equivalent to CLS sucks. The pocketwizard on a master SB-800 provides triggering such that own brand has no clue about the other! I guess I will need to get some sleep soon, so that I can start setup early, in the wee hours.

[Matt Laur]

I'm still not sure that will work. The only way CLS will work is if the controller is on the camera, or connected via multi-conductor cable like the SC-27. Otherwise, the controlling strobe doesn't know when to send out the pre-shutter-release controlling pulsess. I think you may have to go with manual power settings on the remotes, and use SU4 mode. Without a Nikon body talking to the master SB800, CLS isn't going to work, I'm afraid.

[Two23]

I've not had very good luck with CLS outdoors. Indoors it works well, line of sight. Not sure why you would need CLS at all if you have radio triggers. I have 10 Nikon SB-25/28 flash units and set them all to manual mode, and fire using the excellent Elinchrom Skyport radio triggers. I just bought a pair of Alien Bees B1600 640ws lights. Even though they have optical triggers, I plan on firing them by the Skyport triggers. I just haven't had very good luck at all with optical triggers outdoors. I'm also very doubtful that CLS will work without a recent Nikon body, but have never tried it. I think you'd be saving yourself a lot of hassle by simply firing everything by radio triggers, especially outdoors.

 

 

Kent in SD

[craig_shearman1]

You can definitely mix just about any kind of strobes you want -- studio, shoemount, etc. Key is to keep everything on total manual and forget about any kind of CLS, TTL etc. You can use as many pocket wizards as you can afford and they all should trigger just fine.

[spritestress]

Thanks for the SU-4 mode tip. It worked great! It was actually more flexible than other approaches in many ways because the output level of each SB-800 could be set individually in 1/3 stop increments. The SB-800s all fired consistently too.

 

Setup for those photos was a very long day, adjusting everything, and making many test fires before getting the final look I wanted. The Bowens Geminis were fired via Pocketwizards, and the SB-800s simply slaved to their initiation. I think I am going to use this method all time now when mixing SB-800s into a scene. I wish I had explored the SU-4 mode a long time ago!