Massive Light from an SB 600!
I have always been aware that my D40 has an electronic shutter above 1/125th or so, and that theoretically that gives it the ability to sync at any shutter speed. I know people have been doing all this off camera for a while, but I haven’t seen anyone using it on camera for quick fill flash. As to why Nikon limits it to 1/500, I really have absolutely no idea. I built a small mask to cover all but one hot shoe contact, essentially tricking the camera into thinking there is no flash on it. Obviously you loose TTL, but gain the ability to forget about sync speeds all together and just let your creativity run free. With this kind of sync speed, you can shoot portraits directly into the sun (although there will be a little bloom from the sun) and actually expose your subject and the sky perfectly. Using a standard sync speed, say 1/250, that would require using a tiny aperture like f/22 and a studio flash such as an AB B1600. The only other way to do this is to use CLS, which I don’t have the capability for, and even then I suspect this may work better (and defiantly simpler, no menu’s).
f/6.3, 1/4000s, flash at 1/16. I left the EXIF data attached for those interested. There is a little bloom from the sun, but other than that everything works fine.
The small peice of plastic I used to enable all this came from a package of markers, and is the same thing that batteries come in. I had to sand it down a bit so the flash could still slide into the shoe. The idea is to only allow the middle pin to make contact, allowing triggering without the camera’s knowledge of the flash. After sanding down, the flash is a pretty tight fit in the shoe. You could also use tape or paper, but I opted for something that could stand up to repeated usage and be easily removed.
This is the hot shoe mask I made, it fits in the hot shoe, then the flash slides in on top of it.
Due to the duration of the flash itself, there is no power to be gained over 1/16 power on the flash at 1/4000 sec. and 1/8 at 1/2000 sec. for the other shutter speeds, it falls somewhere in between. This is great, as it takes a lot of weight off the shoulders of the flash, and of course, no waiting for recycling. For off camera lighting, the sync speed is limited only to your triggers response time.
Sun is just out of the frame on the left.
Special thanks to David Hobby and the Strobist group, I don’t know if anyone else has done this but the idea came from bits and pieces of information gleamed from that site, specifically this page.
