Making Your Flash Wireless

JEFF REVELL

If you’ve got a recent Nikon or Canon digital SLR (anything from a Nikon D90 on up, or a Canon 50D or later), it has a feature that lets you avoid having to use a sync cable at all—you can get off-camera wirelessly instead. Once you turn this feature on, it acts just like there’s a sync cable in place—when you press the shutter button on your camera, it fires the flash wirelessly. So, you save money because you don’t have to buy a sync cable, you don’t have to worry about your sync cable breaking or getting lost—in fact, you don’t have to worry about dealing with cables at all. It’s really quite brilliant. However, Nikons and Canons go about this whole wireless off-camera flash thing in a different way, so they’re covered separately on the next couple of pages.