Specifically for anyone that wants to venture into high speed synch with studio strobes.
Forget the rest, just grab some Pocket Wizards.
This may appear a bit Nikon specific because that is what we own.
We have owned the MiniTT1 and FlexTT5 transmitters / transceivers for a while now and used them at fairly low shutter speeds with success. ( 1/250 – 1/1000)
The other day, because I had some spare time and a subject that could jump I upgraded the firmware and tried to fine tune the hyper synch function of the pocket wizards to the fastest possible speed.
The fine tuning occurs with the transceivers plugged into the PC and the delay slider in the Pocket Wizard Utility adjusted to achieve the correct balance between front curtain and rear curtain shutter showing at higher than normal x synch speeds. It takes a bit of experimentation to get there but after six or so static shots and three animated shots I concluded that they were good enough for me at maximum shutter speed (1/8000) to allow for usable images.
Please ignore the subject matter as it was all done with a brief of being able to see shutter curtain shadow intruding into the image at high speed. The only creative input was limited to telling Alex to “jump and fast , but please don’t look like a total wally while you do” ---- dunno if we succeeded there or not.
The exif is in the shot but the full details are
1x 400WS monobloc at ½ power
ISO200 , 1/8000, F/4
There is a tiny amount of rear curtain showing in that ( and any number of totally repeatable shots ) but nothing that can’t be easily dealt with in post processing either via filling or cropping.
Totally freezing motion can be handy in some studio scenarios just as showing some motion can be desirable in others but if you want to stop any subject movement totally these triggers are the way to go.