Originally posted by MilamBardo Hi guys,
... First of all, I don't know how to even connect my Pentax to these external flashes, I've looked at the instructions, and they are confusing me. Lets say I want to just hook everything up with cables. Is this possible? Or do I have to use wireless of some sort? I really am at a loss here. I know I need to avoid high trigger voltage in my hot shoe.
Anything that's designed to be used with digital cameras is going to have a safe sync voltage of <10V, and probably <5V. And dSLR bodies can tolerate anything below 250V.
Someone here said they found a stated voltage limit with Pentax is 0-380V.
You
can hook everything with cables, but if your camera doesn't have
a PC sync port, you'll probably have to get a hotshoe-to-sync adapter, so you can cable it to the studio strobe. All studio strobes have sync ports for attaching a cable. The trick will be finding a cable with the right connectors to match your hotshoe adapter and the strobe. 3.5mm phone connections are common, where you could just use mono audio cables.
But. You can also use radio triggers. And that's a lot more convenient than trying to find a big long sync cable. You just need a transmitter to go on the camera hotshoe, and a receiver to cable to the studio strobe's sync port. Again, finding the appropriate cable is mostly just matching connectors to ports. If, for example, you get a pair of
Flashpoint R2 SPT transceivers, they use a 3.5mm sync port. Say, you then want to get a
Paul Buff Einstein. It also has a 3.5mm sync port, so you could just get a small
3.5mm-to-3.5mm cable to connect the Einstein to the SPT. Similarly, you could also get a
PC-to-3.5mm cable for your large format camera (I assume it has a PC sync port for flash).
But. You could also get
a Godox DP600 III. The Flashpoint R2 system is a rebranded version of Godox's X system. And the SPT triggers would work to give you remote firing, and group on/off control. A
Godox XPro-P would also give you remote M power, and modeling light control. And you wouldn't need to add-on a receiver, since the DP III series has a Godox radio receiver built-in.
Quote: The other thing I may have a problem with: I do not want my on-board camera flash popping up and firing a pre-flash in a master slave scenario. In the picture that I want to take, it it essential that no light is fired from the direction of the camera. So is this possible on the k50 with an external strobe flash?
Radio triggers don't fire any flash bursts, so that scenario is doable. I also think that if you were doing "dumb" optical triggering with your pop-up and a built-in optical slave, the pop-up flash light contribution to the scene can be managed to be negligible, either by flagging it off and bouncing to the strobe sensor or adjusting power, and working at a distance from the subject so it simply isn't as powerful as the main strobe.