Whew, I finally got the right minimal equipment to do off-camera flashes. With my Canon Digital Rebel, this meant

• Canon Off Camera Shoe Cord OC-E3
• Canon 430EX Speedlite Flash for Canon Pro1

I meant to do this months ago but got the wrong parts -- a flash synchro cable and hot shoe adaptor that just don't all fit together in a way that connect the camera to the flash (a $25 mistake at worst, and I still haven't had time to find out if they might be useful anyway).

Anyway, here are my first photos with this setup, with our cat as a model because she stays still better than other live models in the household (!). The one with whitish carpet and wall as background was really the first photo, slightly cropped but otherwise unedited, just connected the flash pieces and snapped the camera in automatic portrait mode. The one with the dark background is not even in an unlit room, it just had the nice effect that the flash lit the kitty and stuff you can't see, while overwhelming the less-lit background into black.


Only three weeks until Zack Arias' One Light Workshop. Hat tip to Ted Leung for letting me know about that workshop and inspiring me to try all this.