Leaderboard

After being away for a few weeks, managed to get out again at the same site as my previous photos. This time with the Exposure/WB preview turned off, and also with the addition of my focus light now that I have a mount for it. Got this one a bit sharper than the last time! I would love this one to have a bit more "pop" out of the background. Shot at f9, ISO200, ss250. It was also only about 2.5m deep, so a lot of natural light. Wasn't expecting too many large subjects at this site. Lucky this guy was only about the size of a dinner plate so managed to a few keepers with the 80mm. After taking a few photos I also flicked the camera to video mode and shot this video (YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCZTF5u_Vlk). No lights, and just some very much amateur processing in Davinci Resolve

Victory! I figured out how to convince the Sony a7RIII to match the actual preflash power from the YS-D3. Now I'm getting consistent TTL performance from GN2.8 - GN22, even in bright sunlight. TTL also works for 3 fps continuous shooting. In manual power mode, with the trigger board set not to fire a preflash, I can get 8 fps bursts (~8 shots at GN8, ~4 shots at GN11). Can't wait to try to use that with focus stacking in Photoshop on super-macro critters.

I got my firmware-upgraded strobes back a couple weeks ago, and finally had time to profile them today. The good news is the strobes are now very consistent triggered with a LED. In hundreds of test shots, I've never seen them not fire. And the odd double-triggering I was seeing with short pulses is gone as well. The response curves seem better adjusted to work with P&S cameras. I haven't played with them and my RX100, but I have a feeling they're going to behave better. The strobe response curves to LEDs are shifted even further than they were before. So it takes longer LED pulses to trigger a given GN pulse via TTL. That's not too horrible; I can get a reasonable range of output up to GN22 with the strobe set to +1EV. Though I don't seem to be able to reliably trigger the strobe with LEDs below GN2.8. But there's one new annoying behavior. The preflash used to be fixed at just a bit less than 1/16 power. Now it's capped at GN2.8 (1/128 power!). I think they did that to stop the strobe from totally saturating P&S cameras; that matches their release notes. But the Sony a7RIII would really like to fire a 1/16 preflash when using a 90mm macro lens stopped down. Oh, one other interesting tidbit: On most cameras, 1/3EV stops are translated to 0.375 and 0.625. The +/- 0.3 and 0.7 settings on the strobe appear to be +/- 0.25 and 0.75. 1/8EV difference shouldn't matter in practice, but it threw me for a while when I was trying to line up the profiles at different DS-TTL settings. - Randall