Canon ST-E2 Best Price, Review, Compare
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Canon ST-E2 Best Price, Review, Compare.
Product: Canon ST-E2 Amazon Price: Too low to display Availability: In Stock |
Yes, radio flash with strobes is better, but this item acts similarly to a radio-controlled studio, but with great more portability! No need for wireless transmitters and receivers, as the Canon Speedlites you surely fill already glean signals from this thing!
If you need portability with your portraits, this item is for you, since lugging around Speedlights and lightweight stands is easier than heavier strobes with bulkier stands. This makes residence shooting distinguished easier.
If you're on a budget, this item is for you, since you won't need to invest in additional strobes and trancievers and power packs. Unprejudiced combine this with any Speedlites you already acquire.
If you want a hastily and easy backup to your expensive, heavy strobe setup, this is for you, as you're likely to have your Speedlites in your camera bag anyway, and this item takes up about as remarkable room as a Sto-Fen diffuser. You can't go defective with such a diminutive item enabiling near-full studio capability.
There are only two faults with this item:
-Firstly, you need to be line-of-sight with your Speedlites. Indoors, the Speedlites can be pointed in a relatively lawful direction and work. However, outdoors the line-of-sight is vital, with a turn of a few degrees off line causing transmission to fail.
-Speedlites are NOT strobes, and can never match the light output of strobes. You lose continuous modeling light capability and a couple hundred watt seconds of light when you utilize Speedlites instead of strobes. Don't examine to light massive groups of people or vast subjects like trucks with a Speedlite setup.
One oddball curiosity with this item is that if you shoot pets and young children, they rep easy distracted by the red blinking panels of the Speedlites in slave mode. I'm determined slave mode users know this. Nothing major, unprejudiced something to withhold in mind as their heads will tend to point toward your light stands during shoots.
UPDATE: Have owned this itsy-bitsy arrangement for a while now, and the front red panel broke off about six months into owning it. Quiet working glowing, a runt trooper of a blueprint. You can certainly employ this plot to enable portrait shooting in churches and/or for weddings, as I have veteran it for that. I've ragged 430s and 580s on stands through white umbrellas, and the portraits came out amazing. Things go noteworthy easier if you save the flashes into manual mode, so some learning of manual exposure is certainly needed.
Yes: Broad for weddings! Largest group of people in a church I've lit with this device's relieve is 63, which took three speedlites.
Straight on lighting from a camera mounted flash is unnatural and unflattering. The Canon STE2 Speedlite Transmitter is a must have item if you fill a compatible Canon Speedlite (580EX/550EX/420EX/430EX) . Your subject will really enjoy not having the flash pointing directly into their eyes. Plus, with the proper angle, you can cast natural looking shadows that will greatly improve the observe of your portrait shots. With this transmitter you can plot your Speedlite anywhere you like to collect the perfect lighting for the shot. It's a really sizable system when passe with two or more Canon Speedlites. I absorb two Canon 430EX Speedlites that I expend with this transmitter. One flash I exhaust as the main light source is fitted with a unidirectional diffuser to soften the light. The other flash obsolete as a own flash is fitted with an omni-directional bounce diffuser. This transmitter allows you to easily spot the balance of light between two Speedlite groups (group A and group B) . You simply press a button on the befriend to adjust the balance. A lighted meter on the assist of the transmitter shows you the balance setting. This allows you to easily balance the light between both flash groups without having to touch or fade any of the flash units. Very handy! With this setup, you can accomplish professional portrait shots with ease, and not have to anguish about lugging around a bunch of heavy lighting equipment. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT!
I old-fashioned the STE2 with two Canon 430EX Speedlites to do some portraits with grand results. I mounted the Speedlites on stands with 30 hobble shoot-through umbrellas using hot shoe multiclamps. I shot with a Canon 50mm f1/4 lens on a Canon 30D position to manual with a 1/60 shutter and f4 aperture. With E-TTL enabled, the flash power is automatically adjusted to get the upright exposure. I found the flash power to generally be moral on but on the occasion I felt it wasn't, I simply adjusted the flash compensation on my camera. I did not need to meter or spend a gray card so I was able to focus more on composition.
I really like the convenience of this wireless setup because there are no cables to hump over and that makes it really easy to disappear my lights around and try different angles. With a two flash setup, you can easily change the ratio between the two flash units on the relieve of the transmitter without touching anything else. This often helped me salvage better shots because I could hastily modify the light setup to grasp a moment without stepping out from slack the camera.
I would purchase radio control but this setup is very compact and I did not have any problems with the Speedlites not firing even if they were not quite in suppose line of perceive. I even turned my shoot-through umbrellas around to act as reflectors, effectively blocking the line of residence between the camera and the Speedlites, and they tranquil fired so apparently there is a bit of flexibility in that line of plot.
Update 5/25/2007: Although the STE2 worked well for portraits in relatively diminutive rooms, I recently tried to utilize it for some wedding formals in spacious churches, reception halls, and outdoors and found it didn't work so well. Even after putting in impress modern batteries, I was quite slight on where I could status my flashes so they would level-headed fire. I had to have the flashes in front of me and impartial off to the sides for it to work. I have since decided to hold some radio slaves for my wedding work. The other thing I noticed is that if you are shooting a bride in a white dress, E-TTL will tend to underexpose the shot so its value is diminished which makes non-TTL flashes and old-school metering for off camera formal work mighty more tidy.
