On today's Fujifilm Flash
Photography basics, I am going to teach you the single most
significant step that you can take when shooting with
a flash. Well. Hi, everyone. Welcome to pal2tech. Today we are continuing our
Flash Basics For Fujifilm Cameras with Lesson 3. And as always, we are picking
up right where we left off with Lesson 2. Now, by now, you should have
completed your homework assignment from Lesson 2. At this point, you should be
comfortable in shooting with a flash in manual mode and
understanding how your shutter speed, aperture and ISO
and how shutter speed can affect the overall ambiance and
look of your scene. Now, if you have not yet
practiced this, please go back and review lesson number to
do that assignment. And once you have, you
can come back here and continue with Lesson 3. For today's lesson, we are
going to focus on the single most significant step that you
can take in flash photography. I am, of course,
talking about getting the flash off the camera. Seriously, if you learn just
one single thing from this video. In almost every case,
your photos will be so much better, more professional
and more flexible if you get the flash off the hot shoe
mount and, you know, away from it's being sort of the default
sitting on top of the camera and blasting into the subject. People who shoot flash
photographs where they have the flash right on top
of the camera. It's like having one of
those flash bars. Okay. I want you to think
of this image. We're not going to be shooting
with a flash bar or any kind of flash right on the camera. We're not PRESS and we're not
going to do it that way. So in all seriousness, how do
we get the flash off the camera ? Well, there's a few ways that
you can do it. The first is that if you are
connecting the flash to the camera via the sync
terminal right here. We're not going to cover using
the sync terminal in this video. The second way would be to use
a power cord that connects your flash to the camera's
hot shoe mount. And now you can kind of get it
off the camera, but it is limited as far as your
arm can reach. And finally, we come to the
subject of today's video, which is using a
remote flash trigger. And this is how we're going to
get our flash off of the camera. Now, in order to make
this work, it does require you obviously, to get another
piece of gear, the remote flash trigger. In previous videos, I have
recommended using the GoDox TT685 flash or even you could
use the GoDox 350 flash. And if you're currently using
the Godox system then I would definitely recommend picking up
the Godox X2T Wireless Flash Trigger. If you are shooting with
Fujifilm cameras, you are going to want to get the model that
has the little F in it right here. You see that we are not going
to worry about any other kind of gear right now
for this video. There will be additional gear
you're going to want to consider, such
as a stand, right. Or a other way to hold your
flash that you've removed from the camera. But not today. Today, it is far more important
that you fully understand how to use a wireless trigger and
to get that flash off your camera, even if you put
your flash on a bookshelf or on the dining room table,
that's good enough for now. So for today's lesson,
you're going to need the flash and a wireless trigger,
which you could use the X2T, which is what I recommend. Or you could get
the Godox's XProF as well. Now, before I go any further,
if there are some of you that have been frustrated in the
past to try to get these wireless triggers working,
you are not alone. I must say that the usability
design of the controls and menus and the setup is one of
the most confusing and poorly implemented UI designs that I
have ever seen in the past 40 years. GoDox, I really hope you're
listening because these things are so much more difficult to
use than they need to be. And not only that,
but the instructions and the documentation are
very limited. We are going
to go very slowly. I'm going to break it down and
we're going to try and make it as easy as possible. And by the end of this video,
you should be good to go. So be patient. As we go through this, I'll be
using the X2T unit, but almost all of the same settings apply
to the XproF as well. Wireless triggers have pretty
much the same basic components. So let's turn it on. And of course, even
turning it on is confusing. There is a power on and off
switch here and if you brought your electron microscope
with you, you may be able to see that there is a slightly
different icon for this switch right near it. This switch turns it on and
this switch controls the autofocus assist beam. Let's now take a look
at the unit. On one side you've got
a usb-c port and a 3.5 millimeter sync port. The Usb-c port is used for
updating the firmware and that's a whole other video
we'll cover eventually. On the top, you've got five
groups of buttons A through E. You see that. And a button to test and fire
your flash on the front. You've got three main buttons
and they also serve a dual purpose as well. On the bottom you've got your
battery storage, a hot shoe mount and a selector button for
when you're inside the menus. Now what's great about the X2T
and why I actually now prefer it over the XProF is that you
can mount a flash to the top of it and then you
mount this to your camera. So you mount the trigger to the
camera and you mount the flash to the trigger. Now, this setup might seem a
little odd, but it actually gives you a little
bit of flexibility. You can have the flash on
your camera, right, if you wanted to, and you could bounce
it off the ceiling while at the same time you can control other
flash units that are away from the camera that
you're wirelessly controlling. And you could turn those on,
or turn those off If you wanted to turn them off and
only use the flash that's on your camera. Easy to do, but we're not going
to do that because the goal is to get the flash away
from the camera. Now, before we continue with
this video, I have a setting change that I think is going to
help you out while you're going through and practicing. Okay. This setting will allow you to
work with this wireless trigger without it constantly going
into standby mode. Go ahead and press the menu
button and use the scroll wheel to scroll down to where
it says Standby. Currently, it's at 60 seconds. Go ahead and press the set
button and then rotate the wheel again. And you can set it
to 30 minutes. Press set and then you can
press menu to go back. Now, this will stay on
for 30 minutes while we do our exercises. But once you've learned
this thing, I recommend going back into the menu and setting
it so that it turns off after 60 seconds. You'll save
your battery life. Okay. We are now ready to connect the
two of these together. And the first thing that you
need to do is to tell your wireless trigger where and how
to find and locate the flash. Basically, this needs to
talk to this. And you do that by making sure
that three things match up. Your group letter,
your channel number, and your wireless ID number. The first thing we're going to
do is set our channel. Now, you may not be the only
photographer on the block or in the room or in the apartment
building where you're living or wherever you are. So in order to make sure you're
using the best channel, you need to conduct a scan. Go ahead into menu. Use the selector wheel
to find scan. Go ahead and press set. Use the selector wheel again to
turn it and choose. Start. Go ahead and press set again. It is now scanning the area for
other Godox wireless triggers and interference and whatever
it needs to look for. And it's going to come back to
us with a list of channels. And there you go
with a thumbs up sign. These channels right here are
all good, and you can use any of them. So now that you're already in
your menu, use the selector wheel and scroll down to
channel press set. Use the selector wheel again
and choose 19. Go ahead and press
set again to save it. And we've just set the
channel to 19. Next, we're going to
need to set our group. Remember, there's A-E on
the top here. We're not going to get too much
into groups, but just know that groups can be groups of
various flash units. Okay. But right now, we're just going
to work with one group and we're going to choose Group A. So go ahead and press
the A button. Boom. Once you've done that,
it will highlight the group. You see that? And you could if you wanted to
see the other groups rotate the selector wheel down. There's D and E, you see that? So right now we are
channel 19, Group A. Now go ahead and press mode. Press it again until
it says M for manual. Remember, we're doing
all manual flash. If you don't know about that,
go back and watch Lesson 2. So you should see
something like this. Group A is set to manual
and we are on channel 19. And finally, we need to
set the Wireless ID number on this unit. Now, you don't always have
to do that. However, I got to tell you,
I have noticed connection problems between this
and the Flash. If you don't set this, so I'm
going to have you set it. All right. You're going to pick one. Here's how you do it. Go back into your menu by
pressing the menu button and use the selector
wheel to select. I'd go ahead and press set,
turn the selector button, and you can pick any
number you want. It doesn't matter which one
you pick, but just remember the one you picked. You can choose anything from
1 to 99. I'm going to go ahead
and choose 99. When you're done, press
set to save your changes. Okay, We're all done. We have our channel. We have our group, and
we have our Wireless ID set. Now we've got to do
the same thing to the flash. Go ahead and turn on
the flash unit. Once you've done that,
you're going to press and hold down this button right here. Press it and hold it
down and you'll see this really confusing menu up here. Once you, do rotate the scroll
wheel and scroll down until you see I'd see that right there. Then press the reset button. Remember, we had set the
Wireless ID on this to 99. We're going to do
the same thing to this. Once you've set it to 99,
go ahead and press the back button here. The next thing we're going to
do is put the flash unit into what is called Slave Mode. Before we set the channel and
the group to do that, you want to press this button right here
that has this weird little Z looking icon on it. Go ahead and press it. And what it does is it toggles
through various set ups. We're going to pick the
one called Slave. So keep pressing the button
until you see a set up that says Slave. You see that? Now we're going to
set the channel. And to do that, you press this
button right here and you see it even has a CH
above it to mean channel. Go ahead and press it
and it selects the channel. Then you can use the little
rotating ring to dial in the channel that you want. And we had chosen
Channel 19 from this one. So we need to put in 19 here. And lastly, we need to
set the group. And just as we had set group A
for this, we're going to set group here and you see the
little GR that's just above this button here. Go ahead and press
that button. And as you press the button,
it rotates through the various groups A, B and
C and so forth. Make sure that you choose A and
just to confirm, you're on Channel 19, Group A,
And finally, we want to make sure that this mode uses manual
mode for the flash. To do that, you
need to use this button. Right here, the mode button. And as you press the
mode button, it will toggle through the various mode
settings right here. Right now it says TTL. We want to change that. I'm going to go ahead
and press the mode button once. There it is. Now it says MULTI. I'm going to press it again. If you don't see and continue
to press the mode button until you cycle through and
you see them. So at last you should be m
enslave mode on Channel 19 in group A and you've set and made
sure that your Wireless ID matches between these two. Oh, I'm exhausted already. Let's see if this was
all worth it or not. I'm going to go ahead and put
the wireless flash trigger on the camera. Now, something to keep
in mind. You can also see what
is going on with your flash. If you go into your fujifilm's
camera menu into the flash section. Okay. Moment of truth with this. Here we go. Hey, it worked. It fired it off. That's great. We know that this remote
trigger will remotely trigger this flash. That and you can then move this
anywhere you want, as long as you're within range. Not bad at all. Now, something to keep in
mind here, and that is you are now fully controlling and using
the wireless trigger to make all of your setting changes
for the flash. I mean, pretend you're
in a banquet room somewhere photographing a wedding. This flash may be on
the other side of the room. You need to be able to make the
setting changes to this flash right from this unit that's on
top of your camera. So the most important setting
you're going to want to make from the flash trigger itself
is the flash power. Remember in my Lesson 2, I went
over flash power and what that can do and how that
affects your photos. Watch what happens when I
rotate the selector knob and change the power of the flash. You see how as I rotate the
knob on the flash trigger, the power on the
flash also changes. Now, if you are having trouble
getting these two to connect and to talk to each other,
there's one final setting I have for you that may help
press the menu button to go into the menu of
your wireless trigger. Rotate the selector knob until
you choose DIST or distance and it should be set the
default of 1 to 100 meters. Now, while I have found that it
seems to generally work okay, if I set it to the other one,
which is 0 to 30 meters, the flash and the wireless
trigger seem to have a more reliable connection,
particularly if I am close by. So unless you're shooting in
a huge area. Right. I would recommend try setting
it to that if you're having trouble getting these
two to talk. And with that, the lesson
is now complete. I do have some homework
for you, and it's a real simple assignment. Just one thing. What you need to do is set up
your flash to work with your wireless remote trigger. You should be able to fire it
off from the camera and have the flash go off by following
the steps that I showed you. If you have a TT350 flash or
anXProF wireless trigger, the setup is pretty much
the same thing. Set the Wireless I.D.,
the Group Letter, right? And the Channel. Those three things should be
the same on each one of these. There are also many other
tutorials on YouTube that you can check out that could kind
of drill down in to the specific flash model
that you're using. Either way, your goal, again,
is to get the flash off the camera and to be able to
successfully fire it from the camera and as an extra
bonus assignment, go ahead and take a few shots and make sure
that when you adjust the power on the remote trigger, that it
is reflected on the flash. And something to
remember about that. Sometimes you will not see the
flash power update on the back of the flash, but you will see
it on the wireless trigger. So, for example, let's say you
set your power, your flash power on the wireless trigger,
two one quarter power. However, on the flash, it might
still show full power or half power. What I found in those
cases is that the menu has simply not updated. However, the flash will
definitely fire with whatever power setting is on
the wireless trigger. So don't get caught up too much
in worrying about what it says on here. Pretend almost that you don't
even see this because you might not. This thing might be way
up high or mounted somewhere. What matters is what you
see here, how this is adjusted and how it communicates
reliably to the flash. This is one of the more
important but probably more tedious of the lessons that I
will go through with Flash. But it's very, very important
that you know how to have these two connect. So let's see what you can do on
your own with the homework and getting these two to talk. And it will catch
you in the next lesson. Good luck with this. Don't get too frustrated and
I'm sure you're going to do great. Well, anyhow, thank you so
much for watching. And I hope you
found this video helpful or at least entertaining. And if you did, be sure to give
it the like and subscribe. I'm going to be signing
off now, but have a wonderful weekend and I will see you
in a new video next week. Take care.
