Mert and Deb

My sister-in -law Debbie with her mother Mert






This Is Mert. Mert is my sister in laws mother who is now 87. Mert loves to have her smoke breaks. Fortunately for her she doesn't seem to have any health issues as a result of smoking most of her life. My in laws visited this weekend and as usual all I can think about is taking photographs. I wonder if it gets in the way sometimes?

I purchased the new Pocket Wizard Mini TT1 and Flex TT5 last Wednesday and wanted to run it through some tests. Since my family is tired of me photographing them I asked Mert to be my subject. She stepped up and we had fun. Good Ole Mert is a kind soul that still has a healthy sense of humor and tolerates younger people pretty well.

As far as the pictures go they weren't intended to go in the hall of fame just a test shoot in the back yard. While I screwing around with my equipment the rest of the family's went about their business in the back yard.

A friend of mine commented the photo's don't look light. They look like natural light. Maybe I balanced the light to evenly. I'm at a 2 to 1 ratio. That's highlight to shadow ratio. Maybe I should have tried a 4 to 1 ratio. Next time I will be more expressive. The Pocket Wizard mini TT1 and the Flex TT5 should be a plug and play unit. So far that isn't quite the case. Their seems to be some problem with them especially with distance. Inconsistent flashes or no flashes. Now there are a lot of variable why this could occur so I'm not throwing them under the bus yet. Although it does seems typical of manufacturers these days to sell their goods before they are perfected. I guess the sales helps pay for the R&D moving forward. Good thing is all I need to do is go to my computer for product updates which I upload directly into the TT1 & the TT5 software. Rumor is they are working on a few glitches. Isn't technology amazing!

I only have one TT1 and one TT5 at this time. I hoping to get a couple more TT5's so I can start using multiple lights more creatively. When Pocket Wizard gets the bugs out this will be great advancement for serious photographers who use lights. I know of a company who makes a product called Poppers. I have seen these used and they're very impressiveness.

For those of you that don't know about these systems what they will do is allow you to use multiple flashes / that are fired by radio frequency while in ETTL mode. The flash syn speeds go as high as you want or need. For example; the photo of Mert standing with people in the background was shot near sunset on an overcast evening using a small soft box. My shutter speed was 1/1250th of a second @ f-1.4. The photo of Debbie with her mother was shoot at 1/1000th of a second @ F 1.4. Both times the off camera radio triggered flash synched correctly with the camera. Very very cool.