Image of the Week: Bullseye, Citronelle, Alabama

Location lighting is a well-skinned cat. Monolights, power packs and heads, hotlights, small shoemount strobes...there are many choices. When I need to travel light, I get away with a bag full of SB-25 and SB-26 strobes and enough PocketWizards to fire them for lighting situations where I don't have AC outlets available and can't haul a Pelican case full of studio strobes. After a couple minutes of setup attaching cables and checking exposure with a handheld light meter, I'm ready to roll.

But Nikon's Creative Lighting System is changing all that. Using a DSLR with pop-up flash unit, or a dedicated infrared flash unit to "command" a small army of Speedlights, you can mimic the results of much larger studio strobes for a fraction of the weight and complexity.

The system works by attaching a "Commander" to the hotshoe of your DSLR. Certain high-end Nikon DSLR's will allow you to use their pop-up flash as the Commander. There's also the Nikon SU-800 Infrared flash that will serve as a Commander for cameras without a built-in flash. The Commander emits a series of ultra-fast "pre-flashes" that evaluate the scene and tell other remote Speedlights the proper flash exposure for the scene. Each remote Speedlight is assigned to one of three groups on four channels, allowing you to control each flash's output, whether you're using TTL or Manual output.

The end result is that you get a portable flash system that allows you to remotely control power levels without having to walk to each flash to adjust, plus there's no need to carry additional radio triggers to fire the flashes in sync.

Your camera bag just got a lot lighter.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on PocketWizards. They're radio triggers and have a much higher range than the infrared-controlled Nikon system, and aren't limited to line of sight. But there are advantages to having remote control over your strobes' power output. I'm impatiently waiting for PocketWizard to release the Nikon version of their new FlexTT5 system, which will give you the best of both worlds: wireless TTL and manual remote control of strobes via Nikon CLS with PocketWizard's reliable radio communication.

This week's image is of Ashton, an eight-year-old girl in rural Alabama demonstrating her diving skills. I placed an SB-600 on the ground at camera left and an SB-900 on the ground camera right slightly in front of the edge of the diving board. Both strobes were set to fire at 1/4 power and zoomed to their widest coverage setting.

Have questions or comments? Send me an email.

Technical Data

Bullseye, Citronelle, Alabama was photographed with a Nikon D300 and a Nikon 85mm ƒ/1.8 lens. The exposure was 1/200 second at ƒ/5.6. Supplemental lighting was provided by two Nikon strobes: an SB-600 camera left and a Nikon SB-900 camera right, both set at 1/4 power and triggered via Nikon CLS.

Other Images of the Week