Off camera flash triggered by Cactus 4 triggers

Hi, I am very new to studio photography and would like to find out some of the following, with regards to manual flash operation
1. What should the power setting be on a AF540FGZ flash when used in conjunction with a silver and or white umbrella.
2. Are there some general tried and trusted camera settings that one can use
3. could someone supply me with some general two light setups ie how far from the subject should the umbrella be, If I make use of a silver and a white umbrella what should the setup look like.

I have tried my hand at some of this but it is more of trial an error. I took over 100 photos and ended up with roughly 8 photo's looking decent, not a very high success rate.

Welcome to the forum.
I'm no expert but can give you some tips.

1. that depends on the ditance from the subject to the flash, and also the settings of your apeture and ISO on you camera.

2. Since you've complete controll and that light doesn't varries use M mode on your camera and flash and simply try till you get it right.

3. no need to answer that one anymore

So set everything in M mode and start with the flash on 1/4th of the power and the correct zoom settings you need for the umbrella, the flash needs to fill the umbrella just.
Camera starting point would be f5.6 and iso 100 the shutterspeeds isn't so important since you're working with flash light, use 100 or 80 so that you get a little bit of other lights in your shot.

if the photo is to dark you can,
- use a lower f-number
- move the flash closer
- heigthen the flash power
- use an heiger iso

If the photo is to bright do it the other way around.
I hope this helps a bit, just play around till you get it right.

Stefan

Thanks for that. Yes I am trying and like I have said out of +- 100 shot only about 8 that looks decent. I would like to achieve a higher sucess rate than that, but thanks for your input.

Could you post some of the photos, the bad and the good ones.
I'm sure we can give you far more tips then, since we're now i the dark what went wrong

This might be of interest

link

Hi there,

There is an excellent website that will tell you all you need to know about manual flash operation with radio triggers of any kind.

it's Strobist, address is http://strobist.blogspot.com/

But to answer your question as briefly as I can.

Info is for Indoor use.
If you want to light a subject with any of the two types of umbrella's, you need to set your camera into manual mode, set your shutter to 1/125 (safe setting), set you ISO to 400. ISO setting is one of the ways to control your flash power output, the higher the iso the less work your flash has to do to light subject. Your aperture can start with something like F4 or F5.*.

Place your umbrella say right of your subject with flash and wireles trigger attached. Set it into manual mode, then set power level to 1/16th. Place your umbrella about 1 meter away from the subject, or even half a meter from your subject.

Give it a test shot. If it's too dark, do one (only one) of the following,
open up aperture OR move umbrella closer to subject OR set power of flash to 1/8th power OR set ISO higher. DO this in reverse if you have too much light, ie lower settings.

What I just described might be a little bit cryptic but this is what you need to do to roughly get a half decent shot so I suggest you read that strobist blog for more info.

good luck

Just experiment. That's the beauty of digital.

G

Edited to add: But, as said above, put camera and flash into manual. There is no advantage to fancy flash automation in a studio.

By the way, the right shutter speed setting for the K10D is 1/180, and I would imagine that the K20D is the same.

I use an old flash on the camera as a trigger (pointing up, and therefore away from the subject), and two powerful guns with diffusers pointing at the subject. One is set to give more light than the other. Then a third gun is placed behind for the hair.