I have had too few chances to use my umbrella flash set up. Most of my shooting is still natural light (everyday life and such), but this past week, I have had two chances to take photos for a friend of mine who is graduating with his Master’s degree, and I figured that was the perfect opportunity to put my set up to the test in the field. And out comes the umbrella!
The first day, about a week ago, things went ok…not great, but lessons learned. I also wanted to field test a pair of Cactus triggers. “What are those,” you might ask? With those, I can remote trigger my flash via radio (i.e. no cords). Those ended up incredibly frustrating, to be honest. They did not fire very consistently. When you read through discussions about these on Flickr, some folks love them and some hate them. They are consistent for some folks and inconsistent for others. For me, when they are needed, the break. When I am goofing around, they work flawlessly.
Wait, this was about the flash. I will get back to the story.
So, the second day comes along. Seeing as my radio triggers were not reliable, I decided to go optical. Meaning, I could use the pop-up flash from my camera to trigger a little optical sensor attached to the flash. I had heard it might not do well on a sunny day (and sunny it was), but it worked just fine, until…
Pointing down into a fountain (our backdrop), someone said, “Cooper, is that your…” There was no need to complete the sentence, everything went into slow motion and their words would have been incomprehensible, anyway. I calmly walked closer to the long, dark shape at the bottom of the water, then took a glace to where my tripod-flash-umbrella set up had been: nothing. It did not hit me till I saw the white (now folded up) umbrella sticking out from the tripod.
I tried to stay cool so my friends, for whom I was taking the photos, would not feel too bad. I layed down on my stomach and fished it out of the fountain. The flash was…wet. It is an interesting feeling to see water pouring from your equipment. I took the batteries out. That is only sensible, but I figure it will not make much difference with such a low power source and the fact they were already sitting in the water with the flash on anyway.
So, needless to say, I did not get much of a field test out of the optical flash trigger, but I pulled out my handy dandy coffee filter, slipped it over my pop up flash to soften the light, and used that for fill light every now and then.
I honestly thought the flash would be fine in the end. I unscrewed every screw I could find and it ended up looking like C3-PO after coming out of Lando Calrissian’s recycling room (if you are not a Star Wars fan, you can probabaly still figure it out). The trickiest part was getting the head open. The bottom was easy, but I never really did get that head open (I probably should have looked it up online, like I did the spelling of ‘Calrissian’ a few seconds ago). I finally figured the plastic cover where the flash actually comes out would just pop off, and it did, both of them.
I hair dried the whole thing till I was more than satisfied and when I put it all back together (it was not too bad, easier than getting it apart) it worked just fine. As a fun side note, sometime after I put it back together, I was looking for some manual or something for my flash online. I found out the red glass looking thing on the front is a built-in optical slave receiver. In other words, my little optical trigger I mentioned was a silly purchase, because my second hand Nikon SB-26 speedlight already has one built in! Sweet. I feel dumb for not knowing that already (I thought it was just a distance calculating light…which is also in there), but you can bet I will be putting that to work.
So, yes, your flash should be fine if you decided to drop it underwater like I did. Take it apart, hair dry that thing (though without the hair part), and I would guess it will be fine. Oh, I forgot to mention that a bad connection with the Cactus trigger the previous week was loose and I dropped it twice, once concrete, once grass. So, I can confidently say this Nikon SB-26 flash is a tough character.
