smallest nikon to fire studio strobes

[anesh]

<p>Hi, I would like to use a small hotshoe flash (set manually to lowest power) just to set off my studio flash. Any suggestions?</p>

[ShunCheung]

<p>Which camera(s) are you using, film or digital? If it is an i-TTL (or D-TTL) flash, you may have concerns that the pre-flash could potentially set off the studio flash prematurely.</p>

<p>I suppose you can set an external flash to manual to avoid the pre-flash.</p>

[anesh]

<p>it will be set to manual, D90.</p>

[frank_skomial]

<p>Your studio flashes will not recognize any TTL protocol, so you indicate optical trigering. In this case any flash in manual mode will fire your remote flashes equipped with optical slave trigers.</p>

<p>Any flash will do what you want, and a Nikon flash is not necessary. Try any cheap flash first. Make sure your studio flashes have optical slave sensors, or you purchase optical slave sensors for them.</p>

<p>If you shoot with other photographers shooting at the same time and place, then you would need radio trigering instead of optical, or use long sync cables.</p>

[dan_brown4]

<p>Get a simple radio slave, you'll be glad you did.</p>

[pete_s.]

<p>Look for something called an infrared flash trigger or transmitter.<br /> It's purpose in life is to trigger studio strobes.</p>

<p>I saw that you can buy these new on ebay for $15 or so.</p>

[lornesunley]

<p>Can't you set the pop-up flash on the D90 to manual, using the lowest power setting? You could always get one of those SG-3IR doo-hickeys to shield the pop-up flash.</p>

[joseph_wisniewski]

<p>What Dan said. The Yongnuo RF-602 is highly respected, and goes for $35 for receiver and transmitter. Once you start with RF, you'll wonder why you didn't do it years earlier.</p>

[scott_murphy_photography]

<p>I would not recommend using a small on camera strobe. Even if it is very low power compared to your strobes, it may still affect the exposure. I would recommend getting a wireless transmitter and receiver and use that to trigger your main strobe.</p>

[ian_gordon_bilson]

<p>Anesh : here are a couple of low tech options :<br>

1) Use a small shoe-mount flash /optical trigger but get one with a bounce/swivel head so you can point it towards your main flash triggers rather than have it foul up your careful lighting scheme..<br>

2) Use your built in flash,but contrive a foil reflector on it to divert the pulse toward your optical triggers.</p>

[ian_casement]

<p>Any small flash will do.. all you do is put a piece of IR gel on the face and it doesn't interfere with you lights and it does fire them really well. Most studio flash worth having include Photo Electric Cells and it makes sense to use them.</p>

<p>IR transmitters (small flashes with a piece of IR filter over the face) are not too expensive, and might be cheaper than buying the IR filter and small flash..</p>

<p>Wein make IR transmitters along with Elinchrom and numerous others.</p>

[szrimaging]

<p>Seriously, I am with everyone else on saying go for radio transmitters. The price difference between those or an external flash won't be much different.</p>