Pocket Wizards

I have been using Pocket Wizards for more than fifteen years.  They are, IMHO, the most reliable way of wirelessly synching strobes.  Translation; most reliable means, best, and wireless means convenient.  To explain, we need to get into the way back machine, all the way back to 1993.  Here's the situation; Canadian federal election, Liberal leader Jean Chretien's home riding of Shawinigan, on assignment for Time Magazine.  I needed to shoot pictures of Chretien as he gave his victory speech.  Everyone was pretty sure it was going to be a victory speech, as he was running against Prime Minister Kim Campbell, whose poll ratings were dismally low.  I was shooting transparencies, some of you may be old enough to remember that stuff you loaded into a camera, and then waited for someone else to magically turn it into slides.  Trannies required lots of good light to look their best.  My film of choice was Fuji Provia 100 ASA.  Beautiful film, but daylight balanced.  Since the stage was lit for TV, it was tungsten balanced, my only choice for available light would have have been Kodak Tungsten 320 ASA, sub-optimal at best.  

Follow the jump for more...

My only option was to light the stage with strobes to provide me with enough daylight balanced light.  So, at about 9 AM I started installing my lights.  Without Pocket Wizards, I had to hardwire my packs together by using electrical wire, from a 100 ft. spool of lamp cord, and then connect them with a splitter so I could plug-in my synch cord.  The whole process took about four or five hours, including testing with a brand new digital camera, which required downloading the tests to a laptop, since there was no LCD on the back of the camera.  The camera belonged to a friend of mine, shooting for Reuters, and I think it was a 3 megapixel file.  While digital cameras, and new technology don't always make less work, in this case, it is significantly easier to do this today with all our new gear.

Soon after that shoot, I got my first pair of Pocket Wizards.  I bought them at B & H Photo in New York City, a must for any gear head.  Kinda like Mecca for camera geeks.  The store is an entire block of every imaginable piece of photo equipment, with everything on display, just waiting to be fondled and caressed.  At that time, I had to buy a transmitter and a receiver, no transceivers.  They also looked more like walkie-talkies, than camera gear.

My first Pocket Wizard, a 16 channel receiver

I used a set like the one above for more than 12 years.  Then one day, my transmitter stop working.  It was sent back to LPA, maker of PW's, and they told me that it was so out of date, that they didn't have parts for it any more.  Bummer!  But, they offered to sell me a current generation transmitter for $125, instead of the regular price, at the time, of $400.  That's what I call service.  The warranty was so old it was written on parchment, but they still wanted to help me out.  Talk about a company that stands behind their product.

Then came the next generation...

My next generation transmitter

Followed by the Plus II generation transceivers.  These were a big step forward, since they allowed me to have any unit act as a receiver, or transmitter, hence the transceiver designation.

Plus II transceiver

Which brings me to the point of this whole blog, I just got a set of the new Nikon PW FlexTT5's.  I opted for two TT5's, instead of one TT5 and one TT1, since the TT1, which is smaller, is a transmitter only, and takes some funky lithium battery.  Compared to the TT5 which is a transceiver and uses AA batteries.

Pocket Wizard TT5

In the past, all you did was plug in a PW and it worked.  These ones are a bit more complicated than that.  I'm not going to go into the whole rundown on how these puppies work, other people are much better at that, than I am.  I will tell you they are pretty slick.  They allow you to cheat your synch. speed up over it's normal maximum, as high as 1/400th second on my D3 and D700.  Which is brilliant when shooting with strobes, for freezing action, or, if you are trying to overpower bright sunlight.  As well as the option for doing wireless radio controlled TTL shooting with speedlights, for much greater range than the optical version by Nikon.  I haven't had an opportunity to test their maximum working distance, but I've heard it is good.

But, as with all things in life, there is another side to the coin.  All of these great options come at an expense  That is, these bad boys are not exactly plug and play.  You have to understand quite a bit about them, and all of the options.  The first thing I had to do before I even turned them on, was load the PW software onto my computer, so I could update the firmware, via the USB connection.  Software, USB, firmware-these are not your father's PW's.  LPA didn't release the Nikon version for more than a year after the Canon ones, and I was hoping they would have worked all the kinks out of them.  I sorta liked the idea of all you Canon users being the Beta testers.  I was hoping to just hook them up and get all these great new features.  And there are a number of fabulous advantages of the new units over previous generations, but, they do require a fair amount of testing and experimentation with different combinations of cameras and strobes to make full use of all the features.

To be fair to LPA, I have no doubt that these are phenomenally complex pieces of technology, they have to be, to do what they do.  And they do some waaaay cool things.  I would say that if you like the idea of a faster synch. speed, or use wireless TTL, these new units deliver the goods.  But, I sure wish that the online help was a little more helpful, if LPA is reading, how about some user forums?  There is a chart of Canon cameras and different strobes, and how to optimize the settings, but nothing for Nikon, so far.  In general, whether you are a Canon, or Nikon, shooter, we would all benefit from an easier interface and a bit more of the plug and play.  I'm sure LPA is working on it, because they have always made great products and provided support above and beyond, but right now these things are a complicated to use.