A trip to your favorite camera store is great, of course! However, when the time comes to buy a new camera, you may quickly become confused. The diversity of choices is gigantic, and every camera has its pros and cons, and there is not really one camera that fits all. So, I always advise you to search for the camera, which is best for YOU, but where do you have to pay attention to?

 

 

When buying a camera with the intent to work with flash, it is essential to keep a few things in mind.

 

Believe it or not, every brand has its own flash system. For example, Canon and Nikon have great systems, and almost everything for sale is compatible with their brands. On the other hand, Sony was a little late to the party with an off-camera speed light solution from a third party, their own system did work great but was rather limited and pretty expensive when done right. Currently (2022), Sony is a leader in many areas of the photography market, and that also means that now there are enough options to work with flash, even loads of third-party speed lights, triggers, etc. But that was absolutely not the case when I started shooting Sony around 2013 and it really limited my use for me when working with speed lights. (Studio strobes are hardly ever a problem because they operate with “dumb” triggers, just sending over a signal, but speed lights have to be able to “talk” to the camera for all the extra functions)

 

By the way, did you know that although we often think that the correct title is "speed light," many brands have used different names for these little strobes over the years, same with HSS, TTL, and even the way Aperture/Shutter priority is labeled? In essence, it will give the end-user the "same" results, but it can be confusing.

 

Sony for example did have its own speed lights, but they only worked on the camera. If you wanted to use your flash off-camera, you had to buy a second flash to trigger the first one. There were no built-in radio signals for control, and no manufacturers offered compatible triggers or flash units, so it was tricky in the beginning. Luckily, nowadays, there are enough alternatives for speed lights on Sony. Fuji was another example of a brand that didn't support many flash options (and not even tethering) when they released their X series. So, this is something you should think about when buying a camera; are speed lights important for you now or in the future?

 

Do realize that even when they were released the Sony and Fuji cameras were great cameras to start with, but for a third party to create solutions, the camera must have a considerable market share and the techniques used must be available, via reverse engineering or via support from the manufacturer themselves. So, although a camera can be the best in class for the quality it doesn’t mean you can buy all the cool gadgets available from the “bigger” brands. In fact, for most medium format cameras, which have been on the market for years, there are still fewer accessories available than for the consumer Canon/Nikon cameras. So, it’s very important to find a good dealer that can give you proper advice based on what you are going to do with the camera, and what you want to connect to it.

 

The first thing people will often look at are solutions offered by the camera brand itself, often this means you have less to choose between, and the products can be (slightly) more expensive or powerful. Of course, the big brands are not very keen on giving away all the details that make their system work, forcing the third parties to "reverse engineer" the whole chain from camera to accessory and software to launch their own (flash-related) products. This could mean that some functions are not supported or work (slightly) differently from the manufacturer’s own solutions. However, brands like Nissin, Cactus, and Phottix nowadays deliver solutions that work very close to the original (but still different) and even most of the time deliver better performance than the original line-up, it does however become very important when choosing a third-party solution to check if your camera is in the list of compatible devices, and there is always the chance that after a firmware update something doesn’t work anymore. In all honesty the last few years I personally hardly have had any problems after updates and my Nissin and Cactus solutions work just as good as you might expect from something that was designed for the camera specifically.

 

Personally, I think it's important to have a wide choice and thanks to the internet you can find reviews of almost everything but do be aware that the label "works with *****" doesn't always give you the guarantee that everything works as you would expect so make sure to at least check that HSS and zoom works. In essence, at the moment there are third-party solutions that work just as well or even better than the original but also solutions that are labeled “compatible with” and only do the basic material with varying quality. So always be 100% informed when spending your hard-earned cash (it can be gone in a flash). So, let’s look at some details that are important.

 

First of all, you'll have to check if your camera and flash combination supports some form of ETTL and HSS (I'll explain what this means later).

 

It's often possible to trigger a strobe with or from your camera, but it’s very possible not all features you need (or are handy) are supported, which can be a problem when you are starting to use the combination in situations where speed is important for the flow of the shoot. Always using a light meter for example gives great results, but in some situations, you must be able to trust the strobe/camera combination to “figure it out” themselves. Shooting a wedding with a less than perfect ETTL and HSS solution can literally cost you your career.

 

Therefore, I’m happy that the world of speed lights is changing with relatively new brands like for example Cactus. They support almost every system (Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Sigma, and Sony), and the cool thing is they even work cross-platform; in other words, you can use flashes from different brands together, which can safe a boatload of money when you work with different brands or are planning to upgrade in the future to another brand.

 

The Cactus system has support for almost every brand and system. Selecting a universal flash system like this is a great way to start.

 

With all the choices you have, my advice is to keep the future in mind. For example, if you want to shoot tethered (wired or wireless), the number of brands you can choose from already decreases, add to this support for iPad/Android, and even fewer choices are left.

 

The best advice is to stay informed about products because almost daily there are new releases, for example, I’ve been waiting for years for a solution to shoot wired to my iPad and a few years ago it was even labeled as “forget about it” but at the moment we have several working solutions so there is even a choice instead of none. You could for example simply create a checklist of the things you want and need in a camera/flash at present, but also add some thought about what you might need in the future. Nowadays the quality of the cameras is outstanding so that you can use them for many years. You don't want to spend time and money on an upgrade you could have prevented.

 

In all honesty, I think all cameras should support off-camera speed light support and tethering otherwise, it could be a loss of investment later. In all the years I’ve taught workshops I’ve heard countless stories from attendees that they just did a model photography workshop for fun and never thought they would love it and continue with it, this also meant their needs went up to also be able to use off-camera flash and tethering, it would be a bad wake-up call if you at that moment find out for example that your system is not able to shoot tethered.

Every photographer knows the horror of gear not working. Somehow gear tends to stop working by choice and of course especially when the client is around, and it really counts. And trust me even professionals encounter this problem so it’s not just you. Professionals are trained (I hope) to improvise or work around these problems. However, hardware and software are known for their bugs and errors. So always be prepared! The first thing we already discussed, making the correct choices, but even when you did you can still encounter loads of issues during a shoot.

Of course, you can read this book and probably solve many problems beforehand, but I strongly advise that you read the manual as well. I have to be honest in this regard, I rarely read user manuals, somehow, I feel that a product should be designed and that its operation is logical, but when I test new speed lights, I always do read the manual. These small strobes have many options with many settings/modes/options in a relatively small form factor, therefore I always tell my students to read the manual carefully and fully understand where all the buttons are and what they do. In the following chapters, I will give you some tips based on issues that I received via email, social media, or during my workshops.

I love the EVF (Electronic Viewfinder) option you find in many cameras today. I think it’s one of the greatest inventions for modern photographers. The weird thing is that for example in film it has been used for years including all the benefits like focus peaking and over/underexposing a scene, still, somehow photographers really needed to get used to it (and believe it or not some still don’t like the EVF).

You might say that when you buy a mirrorless camera, you’ll end up with an EVF.
So, what is that magical EVF, and how does it work, or help with setting up flash?

An EVF is the replacement of the optical viewfinder, it shows the scene, not like the optical viewfinder, but it shows you the image the way it would look the moment you press the shutter (what you see is what you get). This is very handy in situations where the light is not perfect and the metering inside the camera is easily fooled, think for example about heavily backlit subjects, but also night shots or even something simple as a snow landscape. But it also helps with setting up more elaborate flash setups where it’s for example vital the background is darker than the model.

Besides an accurate preview, the SONY EVF also has the option to display the settings ...