DSF-1s DigiSlave Flash
The solution is to add an auxilliary flash unit but most digicams do not have the necessary flash sync connector or a hot shoe flash bracket as you find on film cameras. What you need is a cordless slave flash that uses the digicam's flash unit to trigger the outboard flash. You can find slave flash units at the local camera store but they won't work with 90% of the digicams out there. Why? The average digicam uses a double-flash instead of a single flash pulse and this will cause the slave flash to go off at the wrong time. SR Electronics has built a line of slave flash units and triggers that have special circuitry in them to count the number of flash pulses and trigger the slave flash on the right pulse. The DSF-1s has a switch on the back that lets you set it to be triggered by 1 or 2 flashes. It also has a bounce flash head that is tiltable for more professional looking pictures. It is much preferred to bounce the flash instead of hitting your subject directly with the flash, it produces a more natural looking finished photo.  The DSF-1 can be used with any digicam by using a simple "L" bracket to hold the unit to the camera. You can get as fancy (and expensive) as you want with the bracket it doesn't really matter. Shown above is my DSF-1s mounted to the Nikon Coolpix 900 using a $10 bracket I found at a local camera store. Besides positioning the flash unit above the lens it also serves as a really stable grip for small digicams.  This is a before and after shot using the DSF-1s in my living room.
 Here's a plant out on my back patio taken at about 10pm at night. The same picture taken without the DSF-1s was almost completely black. This was a zoom shoot with a distance to the subject of 14 feet, that white wall in the background was almost twenty-two feet away! See the full line of |
