Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Hello everyone, here's the thing i have a couple of SBs speedlites, but wanted more power for outdoor action portraits shooting so i got a used Einstein head from a fashion photographer (i discovered yesterday it has over 66,000 shots on it) Couldn't believe it because it is still cosmetically very nice and works like a charm. It got me so hooked up on the product i bought another one last week along with a PW TT5 transceiver and a pair of Power MC2s. As you might expect i'm trying to get a higher speed sync than my D3s' 1/250th sec. I don't need to go as high as 1/8000, don't know if it's even possible but i'd be more than happy to get close to 1/1250 or 1/1600th sec. Has anyone here succeeded doing so with the same rig ? If so i would really appreciate you posting you settings through screen shots of the PW utility program.

So far i start seeing uneven light distribution on the shots made higher than 1/320th, not so much a clear banding more of a light fall off from top to bottom perhaps indicating i'm working with the tail part of the flash's output. All tests done at full power and on color mode for longer flash duration, as i understand it being better. My goal is to do something like Chris Garrison ( just not on a speedboat though). He explains in the following video that he got his Elinchrom hyper synced as high as 1/1600 at full power. I want to believe it's achievable with Einstein heads. Thanks in advance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pPHNcZ0AYQ

Also in this video Alexander Heinrichs who's style i really like, made these action shots (kind of the things i want to do to) But as you will see the ball is blurry and there is some ghosting around the faster moving parts of his model. Alexander says it is due to the slow flash duration of his Multiblitz flash heads used at almost full power. I'm guessing it's also due to a lack of sufficient lighting power with such an amount of ambient light, but a higher than x-speed sync would have helped too, am i right ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J3NJyiZYZk

My German is rusty (rusted shut, really), and the only thing I picked up was Aschaffenburg, which is where I spent a couple of weeks when I visited Germany. Pretty city.

However, it is correct to say the blur came from the flash, as it is the same color as the surrounding area, and the blur goes in the direction of the movement. Back light would have caused the ghosting to be darker. Sufficient lighting to eliminate the blur would mean to darken the ambient to black. And yes, a higher shutter speed would reduce or eliminate the ghosting (assuming the current physical limitations were not present).

As for the gradation, that is going to be due to different parts of the sensor seeing different parts of the flash curve. It may be evened out by using the flatter tail of the flash pulse, but then the power is greatly diminished. And there is not tail on Einstein except at or very near full power.

Depending on what you shoot and how you frame, this link may be useful. http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/10/gr ... -sync.html

No special gear needed.

Thank you very much sir, don't know exactly what i'll do from here but i'll find something.

By nature of how it works, Hyper Sync will always yield some degree of falloff across the frame. The amount of falloff is a function of the timing of the system (where it fires relative to the decay slope of the flash.

Very long duration flash units will give more even results, but less usable flash power.

Personally, I'm not an advocate of Hyper Sync. It seems some users are successful and others spend most of their time fiddling with it.