Sync Terminal

If you use standard studio lighting equipment, then you will use the Sync Terminal (figure 7.51). Back in the day, we called this the PC cable; PC stood for Positive Connection. All of the old cameras had built-in PC ports, so you just hooked the PC cable to the lights and the studio flash power pack, and voilà, you were ready to go.

Nowadays, some cameras have built-in PC ports and others do not. For example, the Nikon D50, D3100, and D7000 cameras do not have PC ports, but the D200, D300, D300s, D700, D2-series, D3-series, and F6 do (figure 7.52 shows the port on the D700). Nikon provides a PC port on the SB-900 and SB-910 so it can be used as a studio light trigger even with cameras that don’t have a PC port. Nikon sells PC sync cords such as the SC-11 and SC-15, but you can buy these types of cables from any camera store on the planet.