A very sad loss. Steve Irwin was a passionate conservationist and showman extraordinaire. Until his tragic demise today, the worst attack he had suffered was a bite on the nose by a parrot, which is pretty good going considering he worked with some of our planets most dangerous animals.

He was most unfortunate to have been hit in the chest by the ray's barbed tail which apparantly pierced his heart. Anywhere else and he'd still be with us, in pain, but still alive.

Its most unikely that any of his friends & family are members of this forum but my condolences to them.

Looks good. I have an observation though. Your top two pics are very dark and the lens pic has shallow DOF. Does this mean that not much light comes out of your gismo? Can you redo the lens shot and produce a totally in-focus result?

Regards,

Don,

In my opinion it's not quite accurate to tag your flash with the generic label. As far as your camera is aware, the 'dedicated' module appears just like a Pentax badged flash unit. It follows then that any flash trigger/receiver would treat it, or need to treat it, the same.

Now I've been giving this radio business some thought and it occured to me that, if it is simple enough to transmit a signal to cause the flash to fire (send start signal), it ought to be equally simple to send the quench signal (send stop signal) too. After all, both signals are initiated by the camera.

Taking that further, as third party flashes need a 'dedication' module to suit the camera they are used with, so would any radio transmitter/receiver solution.

I haven't found one . . . yet.

In fact, its occured to me (OK, you all new anyway) that flashes only ever receive command signals, they don't transmit them. About the only signal I can think of that a flash sends is its readiness to operate, which in radio terms can safely be ignored . . . I think ! ! !

Perhaps if anybody on here has experience of radio triggers, they could confirm that the TTL function is lost when using them.

I guess then you need to determine how much you are prepared to pay to achieve your aim. In making that decision you'll need to balance the frequency of use in this configuration against ease of use when you need to.

The radio triggers are not all cheap, I'm sure if you look around you can find some that cost many hundreds of pounds. I'd have thought that around £10/£15 for one of the chinese ones was worth the risk and ought to simplify the deployment of your flash when you actually need to.

If you wanted to go the hot shoe grip route, you'll also have a psuedo-hammerhead which might be useful.

I would have thought, though I haven't done it myself, that it is easy enough to make an extension cable of just about any length you want as long as the signal voltages don't drop too much that the flash doesn't work.

The hot shoe grip comes with a cable having I think 4 conductors. Companies like Radio Shaack, RadioSpares (RS Components) probably can supply a male/female 4 connector in-line plug/socket of small enough size. Then you need 2 pairs of these, cut the hotshoe grip cable and rejoin it with one pair of plug/socket. Make you extension lead with another pair, then simply join them all together when you need to mount your flash remotely. Ethernet cable has 4 shielded/twisted pairs of wires in it. You could use one pair for each contact to reduce the overall resistance of the cable. If you can find a 5Mtr Ethernet Patch cable, it'll be flexible enough.

Personally, I would go for the radio trigger but I doubt that you would keep the TTL functionality that you would retain with the hard-wired solution.

HI,
Assuming you want the flash to be 5Mtrs away from the camera, you might consider a slave trigger attached to the remote flash, and a smaller flash (to trigger the slave) attached to the camera. That'll do 5Mtrs easily but both guns will contribute light to your compostion. There are radio flash triggers available too where you fit a transmitter to the camera and a receiver to the flash. Search ebay for flash trigger, they mostly come from Hong Kong for about £10.

If you want a pseudo-hammerhead arrangement, where the flash is still attached to the camera, but moved a few inches away to avoid red-eye, the Pentax hotshoe grip is what you need. It comes with a bracket and connecting lead.

Regards,

There is a very useful button on the back of the *istD and I think the *istDS labelled 'INFO'. Can you tell what it does yet? If your model has this button, try to get into the habit of pressing it before an important shot, or every new shooting situation for that matter, and review the INFO that it contains, then make any necessary adjustments. It lists all of the important camera variables and shows how they are set. Curiously, the D doesn't show the metering pattern that is set, but it does show everything that is of interest to me.

A change of procedure that develops into a habit, or even paranoia, is the best option in my opinion.

In summary, if the camera can be improved or changed, it probably will be. The same may not be true of the operator.

Imagine the cost of that little lot in the pre-digital days of film ! ! !

Chances are you would not have taken 40 goes at it.

Great pic.

Brian,

It was rather magnificent. The only thing that really surprised me was the relatively tiny size of its eyes but hey, it made up for it in the ear department After a while of just sitting on my lens it seemed to get quite comfortable and folded its antennae around the side of its head and under its wings. Fascinating creature.

I have an aunt who is absolutely terrified of moths . . . but I couldn't be that cruel . . . to the moth

I only wished I'd had my SMCP-FA 100mm macro lens and the incredible AF140C (thanks for that) with me but I think the Vivitar did a pretty good job and I'm quite pleased with the lighting anyway.

Cheers,

I couldn't find any hover flies but found this beauty clinging to the wall of my room. Picture is contrived, not accidental, but the model seemed very compliant.
To give it some scale, the lens is a 12-24mm DA with a 77mm filter.




*istD, Vivitar Series 1 70-200 Macro, AF500FTZ + Stofen, f8, 1/125, Iso 200 AWB