Off Camera Flash – take your master flash off your camera!

OCF33 E-TTL Cords

One of the tools I recently added to my lighting kit was an OCF33 E-TTL Cord and it's quickly becoming my favorite lighting accessory. The standard Canon off-camera flash cord is the OC-E3. This is a coiled wire cord with a length of 2 feet (60cm). At this short length, it's only really useful if you have your flash mounted on a flash bracket. Although I don't have an OC-E3, I did have a predecessor and I found I was always fighting the coiled wire design.

The OFC33 E-TTL Cord from OCFGear.com is a 33 feet (10m) long, straight wire cord. Made specifically for Canon cameras, this cord allows you to take your master flash far away from the camera, greatly extending your off camera lighting options. If your off camera flash is on a light stand then you can get over 20 feet (7m) of working distance. Being a straight cord, it drops naturally to the floor rather than hanging in the air like a coiled cord. Although this might still be a trip hazard, it greatly reduces the probability of someone on the set inadvertently pulling the lighting set over by walking into the cord!

In a recent commission I was taking a still life for a client. We were close to the shot the client was looking for but light was spilling from the speedlite I had aimed at the flowers in the shot onto the wall behind. Despite re-fashioning the Honl Speed Snoot

‘Fixing' this in Photoshop was going to be a challenge given the gradation in the light – I needed to rebalance the lights.

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RadioPopper

My usual off camera E-TTL flash trigger is the RadioPopper PX System. Like many others in the US, I found myself disappointed in the PocketWizard FlexTT5 for Canon. This is no fault of PocketWizard, it's just that the radio frequency they're allowed to use in the US just happens to coincide with the peak of the RF noise generated by the Canon speedlite 580 EXII which drastically constrains the range of the FlexTT5-Canon.

The RadioPopper reads the E-TTL preflash of the master flash and transmits that to the slave flash units. The drawback is that you need the master flash to be on the camera (or a Canon ST-E2 which has its own limitations). So the solution for me in this situation was to use my OCF33 off camera flash cord to take my master speedlite off my camera and use it to balance out the light in the scene, removing the effect of the spill from the flower highlight, see below.

What worked well was that converting the setup took only a few minutes, I took five different exposures and I was done. The client selected the image above and used it virtually out-of-the-camera with only minimal processing in Lightroom.

No, I didn't need all 33 feet of the cord. OCFGear.com also supply 16-feet cords and will soon supply a 3-feet coiled cord. Mies Van Der Rohe, the architect, is famous for his saying, ‘Less is more'. On an episode of the NBC show Fraser, the character of Fraser Crane said, ‘If less is more, just think how much more more will be!” The 33-feet cord gives you the maximum flexibility and with extra lighting options at the shoot you can significantly reduce your computer time.

OCF Gear is the brain child of renowned photographer Syl Arena. Syl edits the popular blog speedlighting.com and is also the author of one of the best books on off camera flash techniques – Speedliter's Handbook (Amazon). Although both the blog and the book are written around Canon flash photography, many or the articles and techniques can be applied to any camera-flash combination, you might just have to search out equivalent accessories. Although the OCF33 is specific to the Canon line, Nikon users can chain together multiple SC-29 cords to achieve the same ends.

Many thanks to Karen Davis of Karen Davis Design for giving her permission to show these photos here.