Here are two photos that I trawled from the archives …
Firstly, I never used this set-up like this. No, really!
This was honestly all assembled just to see how crazy it would look.
And even I have a sense of proportion about things, and realize I would’ve looked like the photo-geek cousin of The Terminator if ever I slung this around. It does look truly hardcore though!
That’s the D2H with the WT-1A wireless transmitter. The antenna sticking out on the side is the extended range antenna … and this is actually the reason why I slammed all this together. When the extended range antenna arrived I realized that that there was no good way of attaching this to a camera, aside from attaching it to a flash bracket. So I used a Monfrotto ball-head to attach the antenna to the flash bracket.
The radio transmitter (which only appears in the rear photo), is used to trigger other remote flashguns.
I tried the WT-1A in the studio a few times (without the extended-range antenna), and it was pretty amazing to see the images roll in on the computer while I shot. I even had parents check out the photos of their kids on the laptop, as I was shooting. It helped with the proofing of the images, since the parents had already seen every image by the time I was done.
The downside of using the WT-1A is that I am not a network engineer … it just needed one tiny setting somewhere to be off, for the thing not to work. And it was a headache then to track through every step and figure out what had changed. In the end I sold the WT-1A and the antenna, and never actually used the combination on a shoot. So that took care of my problem of how to actually use the extended-range antenna on a shoot.
The bracket is a Custom Brackets bracket that I modified by lopping the extraneous bits off. Some of it with an angle-grinder. (Actually, I AM hardcore!) These days I don’t use a flash bracket that much anymore. (It depends though.) And mostly I just have the Quantum radio transmitter velcro’d to the top of the strobe.
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Love that set up. But then, I am a geek and I don’t care how bad a setup looks as long as it ergonomic and mobile enough.
It is certainly a good thing that you sold the WT1a. It’s not worth messing around with 802.11b and WEP. And I’d rather see SFTP or SSH that a WPA/WPA2 implementation done by Nikon.
Comment by Dave — November 1, 2007 @ 5:14 pm