Firing a Second Flash in Another Room

Let’s say you’re shooting the interior of a home and lighting it with off-camera flash. Nothing looks worse than seeing an adjoining room (maybe the dining room in the background) looking all dark, so you put a second flash in there and aim it at the ceiling to light that room. So far so good. Now, of course, in that dining room you don’t want to actually see the flash unit itself, so you hide it from view, right? Here comes the problem: these flashes work on “line of sight” (meaning your second flash has to have an unobstructed view of the master flash. If it doesn’t, it won’t fire). So, here’s the trick to get around that: you set your flash to Remote (or Slave) mode (depending of which brand of flash you own), and then it doesn’t have to be in the line of sight anymore—if it detects even a tiny hint of light from the flash in the main room, that puppy fires! Keep this in mind the next time you need to hide a second flash, or put it where the whole line-of-sight thing won’t work.