Hi everyone

I've encountered a bit of an issue which I am hoping you can shed some light on and help with for me....

I have some (admittedly pretty cheap) strobes set up in a home studio and I have been photograhing a lot of children. Now usually I set my camera settings to 1/125s at f11 for studio work, but I understand that for photographing children it is better to try to stick to a shutter speed of 1/200 or faster (feel free to correct me if you think any of these settings are wrong to begin with!).

The problem is that if I use a shutter speed any faster than 1/160 then I start to get a portion of the image coming out black (like a black stripe going vertically from the edge of the frame into the image - how wide this is depends on how much faster than 1/160 I go) - which I understand to be due to the fact that the shutter speed is too fast for the flash synchronisation.

Now this leaves me with a dilemma, as I am finding (especially when shooting toddlers) that quite a few of my images are not completely sharp. Since they tend to be the shots where the kids are moving around I have decided that this must be due to a too-slow shutter speed (although if anyone can also suggest what focus modes to use for kids I'd appreciate it!). Also i have some shots where the kid is in sharp focus but their hands are blurry because they were flapping them around, which in this case i know is definitely due to the shutter speed.

So I guess my question is: is the max synchronisation speed of most studio lights this slow, or do most strobes have a faster max synchronisation speed?

I'm just wondering whether I basically need to go out and invest in some better lights that allow me to use a faster shutter speed, or if in fact I'm doing something wrong and I should be able to make it work with my current kit???

Thanks so much

Jo