tech nerd: pocket wizard relay mode

This video explains Pocket Wizard's relay mode and how to apply it in a situation where you want to use a remote camera with off-camera lighting.

I stayed up late on Tuesday night to have this post ready for Wednesday, then I realized what day it was. I don't think anyone can get away with a tech blog posting on April 1st after David Hobby's forehead slapper last year. So I waited.

So, how can you use your off camera strobes with a remote camera? This can come in handy in a number of situations including indoor sports photography like basketball where you're using a pre-focused remote camera pointed toward anticipated action. Often you've already put up some lights to use with your primary camera, but you want to make full use of them and sync them up with the remote camera as well. I've seen forum postings saying to just put everything on the same channel and fire them all at once. This ends up not working and causing all kinds of confusion. Here's the solution. Enjoy.


tech nerd: pocket wizard relay mode from Jeremy Bales on Vimeo.


Basically you need to set the transceiver on your remote camera to relay mode. It will receive a signal on one channel and send a signal on a different channel. This is an automatic function built into the Pocket Wizard transceiver (there's no switch to flip) and since everything happens in a split second, it can be confusing. The relay is you remotely trip the camera and the camera remotely trips the lights. Clever.