Sunpak

I called off on the Elgin trip this morning. Ominous sounding road reports and snow at the back door made my mind up.

If I don't go to work I don't get any wages so I had to call another client very early to see if they could accommodate me at ridiculously short notice. Like most people we work for they were needing the job done quickly so that was fine. The site was at sea level on the west coast a little south of Fort William. It was wet and windy and felt really cold but the trip and the site were snow free.

Home and in to a barrage of horrid admin stuff that won't go away and now its dark without a blip.

And then a flash of inspiration.

I dug out my ancient Sunpak flash with contacts dedicated to Minolta 35mm film cameras of the time. Its funny I remembered straight away how to use it. There is no fancy TTL metering but a wee sensor (Thyristor) quenches the flash once it thinks it has put out enough light. The clever bit is that you set one of two apertures manually on the camera and the flash sync speed, the flash does the rest. There is a little sliding scale for the aperture setting you choose so if you up the ISO you can reduce the aperture that the flash will work to.

I don't particularly like camera mounted flash photos as the light is all or nothing at a given range and doesn't look natural. The Sunpak can point at a white ceiling and bounce a more diffused natural light on the subject. I used to have a little cube that clipped in to the hot shoe and this would trigger the flash from another set at low power on the camera.

Anyway, here is a picture of Caley, Sunpak illuminated off the ceiling.