As long as you’re by yourself, just you and your fl ash, things are good. But what happens
if you’re hired to shoot an event, like a wedding for example, and you have a second (or
third) photographer shooting along with you (it’s more and more common to have a
second shooter at a wedding—especially weddings in Texas, where the ceremony is
held on a grassy knoll. Sorry, that was lame)? The problem you’d probably face is that
sometimes the second shooter’s camera would trigger and fi re your fl ash (and vice versa).
That’s why your fl ash has diff erent channels. At the beginning of the wedding, you’d set
your fl ash to Channel 1, and you’d tell your second shooter to set their fl ash to Channel 2.
That way, your camera will only trigger your fl ash, and theirs will only trigger their fl ash. By
the way, you have to set the channel in two places: (1) on the wireless fl ash unit itself, and
(2) on whatever you’re using to trigger your fl ash. For example, if you’re shooting Nikon
and the second shooter is using their camera’s built-in Commander unit to control their
wireless fl ash, you’d need to have them set their Commander to Channel 2. If you’re shooting
Canon, then you’re probably using another fl ash mounted on your camera’s hot shoe
as your master fl ash, and in that case, you’d set that fl ash to Channel 2. If all of this “master”
and “wireless” stuff sounds confusing, then you now know why I said you really need to
read volume 2 of this book fi rst, because it covers all the basics of wireless fl ash. Then all
this would make more sense (and it would sell another book, which isn’t a bad thing).
The Digital Photography , volume 3