A while ago, I wrote about ‘biowizards’, as a dirt cheap alternative for Pocketwizards to trigger a flash wirelessly. I didn’t think it was practically possible to (repeatedly) trigger a flash manually with a shutterspeed faster than 1 second. The photographer needs to give a sign at the right time and the biowizard needs to react at the right time too.

During my alternative photo safari with Jean in Valencia the day after the FEP-congres, I discovered that it’s possible to manually sync a bit faster than 1 second. I wanted to shoot Jean’s portrait with a stunning piece of architecture in the background. I couldn’t balance subject and background with just the available light. All my stuff to trigger flashes wirelessly changed hands the day before, so the only gear we had was Jean’s camera (5D) and a flash (580EX).

To steady the image, I supported the camera on a trash can. Jean held the flash in his left hand and pointed it towards a big information panel just outside the frame to camera right. We played around with shutterspeed, aperture and iso-settings. We found out, we could sync 2 out of 3 times up to 1/6th of a second.

As much as I like Jean, he will not replace my pocketwizards. I just wanted to point out that some creativity can often compensate for a bunch of expensive equipment.