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$42 flash

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

I'm feeling rather pleased with myself. I've managed to "make" a flash unit for my digital camera. The ingredients were:

1x dSLR with a hot-shoe but no PC port (grrr)

1x existing flash unit (no swivel, no tilt, no zoom, no PC port: grrr)

1x hot shoe to PC adapter

1x ball-and-socket hot shoe to tripod screw-mount adapter

1x tripod screw mount adapter

1x PC to hot shoe adapter.

I plugged them together in this order (top to bottom):

flash unit

PC-to-hot shoe adapter

tripod screw-mount to hot-shoe adapter

ball-and-socket hot-shoe to tripod screw-mount adapter

hot shoe to PC adapter

camera

The two PC adapters are connected with a PC cable.

Both of the hot-shoe/PC adapters are insulating. This means that they do not conduct the charge passing through the active hot-shoe interface to the other hot-shoe interface. This is important because I'm using that functionality to prevent the flash from frying my dSLR.

Anyway, this is what it looks like.

Not only do I have an adapter that lets me connect any flash of indeterminate voltage to my dSLR, but I had full tilt and swivel functionality from my existing flash.

I got the idea from the Strobist blog, which I've been wading through of late. I've decided to start using an external flash with my dSLR because I haven't been happy with the in-camera flash: it's too weak and it can't be effectively used in automatic mode with the manual-focus lenses I've got. What's more, some of the photography I've been doing demands more than the in-camera flash's feeble efforts when it comes to fill flash. So here I am.