Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 10:08 PM Sandbags! Sandbags! Sandbags!
First, some house keeping. I’ve been on a hiatus for the past few months, work, school and other things have gotten in the way of me writing post or finishing the site. I hope to have everything up and running in the next month or so! Thanks for being so patient!
Just a quick post today that was sparked by a mistake I made today. I just bought the Nikon SU-800 and the way I have my room set up, it was impossible for the SU to trigger the the SB-900 I have mounted at ceiling height. To over come this problem I set the SU on a light stand and raised that to the same level as the SB and tethered that to my camera via an SC-29 cable.
Everything is all good and dandy, camera fires, signal carried to SU and triggered the SB with full TTL control. One problem, I didn’t think about putting a sandbag on the stand the SU was mounted to. I was thinking “I don’t need a sandbag, all I’m shooting is a dog sitting on my bed, which is less than 2 metres from the stand. It should be stable enough, right?” WRONG! I began firing off a couple a fames, getting different angles, and BOOM I hear a crash behind me.
Before I knew it ;)
my SU-800 was on the ground. Not a big deal, my floors are carpet. After I picked up the stand, I noticed things weren’t sitting straight. The fall had fractured the thread mount on the bottom of the SC-29. It didn’t look like that there was much damage, just a hair line fracture.
After stabilizing the stand with a sandbag, I got back to shooting...well tried. The fracture or movement severed a cable inside the SC-29 and now I’ve got to buy another one, it retails for around $100. The take way of this lesson is, a $10 sandbag can and will save your equipment and is worth putting on any light stand or c-stand you may be using. Even if its just a quick shoot, bag it!
If you’re wondering which leg to put the sandbag on, it should be placed on the leg that is facing the direction of the weight so that the sandbag is directly below the object. Also if using a c-stand, the sandbag goes on the highest leg, which is also facing the direction of the weighted object.
ALWAYS USE A SANDBAG!
Ps. If you’re wondering what photo broke my cable, here is it.
Reader Comments (1)
Great photos....love the photography....