Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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95 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Portability for portrait shooting, December 5, 2006
Yes, radio flash with strobes is better, but this item acts similarly to a radio-controlled studio, but with much more portability! No need for wireless transmitters and receivers, as the Canon Speedlites you surely own already accept signals from this thing!
If you need portability with your portraits, this item is for you, since lugging around Speedlights and lightweight stands is easier than heavier strobes with bulkier stands. This makes location shooting much easier.
If you're on a budget, this item is for you, since you won't need to invest in additional strobes and trancievers and power packs. Just combine this with any Speedlites you already own.
If you want a quick and easy backup to your expensive, heavy strobe setup, this is for you, as you're likely to have your Speedlites in your camera bag anyway, and this item takes up about as much room as a Sto-Fen diffuser. You can't go wrong with such a small item enabiling near-full studio capability.
There are only two faults with this item:
-Firstly, you need to be line-of-sight with your Speedlites. Indoors, the Speedlites can be pointed in a relatively correct direction and work. However, outdoors the line-of-sight is critical, with a turn of a few degrees off line causing transmission to fail.
-Speedlites are NOT strobes, and can never match the light output of strobes. You lose continuous modeling light capability and a couple hundred watt seconds of light when you use Speedlites instead of strobes. Don't expect to light massive groups of people or large subjects like trucks with a Speedlite setup.
One oddball curiosity with this item is that if you shoot pets and young children, they get easy distracted by the red blinking panels of the Speedlites in slave mode. I'm sure slave mode users know this. Nothing major, just something to keep in mind as their heads will tend to point toward your light stands during shoots.
UPDATE: Have owned this little device for a while now, and the front red panel broke off about six months into owning it. Still working fine, a little trooper of a device. You can certainly use this device to enable portrait shooting in churches and/or for weddings, as I have used it for that. I've used 430s and 580s on stands through white umbrellas, and the portraits came out fantastic. Things go much easier if you put the flashes into manual mode, so some learning of manual exposure is certainly needed.
Yes: Great for weddings! Largest group of people in a church I've lit with this device's help is 63, which took three speedlites.
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45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must have item!, January 26, 2007
Straight on lighting from a camera mounted flash is unnatural and unflattering. The Canon STE2 Speedlite Transmitter is a must have item if you own a compatible Canon Speedlite (580EX/550EX/420EX/430EX). Your subject will really appreciate not having the flash pointing directly into their eyes. Plus, with the right angle, you can cast natural looking shadows that will greatly improve the look of your portrait shots. With this transmitter you can place your Speedlite anywhere you like to get the perfect lighting for the shot. It's a really great system when used with two or more Canon Speedlites. I own two Canon 430EX Speedlites that I use with this transmitter. One flash I use as the main light source is fitted with a unidirectional diffuser to soften the light. The other flash used as a fill flash is fitted with an omni-directional bounce diffuser. This transmitter allows you to easily set the balance of light between two Speedlite groups (group A and group B). You simply press a button on the back to adjust the balance. A lighted meter on the back of the transmitter shows you the balance setting. This allows you to easily balance the light between both flash groups without having to touch or move any of the flash units. Very handy! With this setup, you can create professional portrait shots with ease, and not have to worry about lugging around a bunch of heavy lighting equipment. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT!
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48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for portraits., February 23, 2007
I used the STE2 with two Canon 430EX Speedlites to do some portraits with excellent results. I mounted the Speedlites on stands with 30 inch shoot-through umbrellas using hot shoe multiclamps. I shot with a Canon 50mm f1/4 lens on a Canon 30D set to manual with a 1/60 shutter and f4 aperture. With E-TTL enabled, the flash power is automatically adjusted to obtain the correct exposure. I found the flash power to generally be right on but on the occasion I felt it wasn't, I simply adjusted the flash compensation on my camera. I did not need to meter or use a gray card so I was able to focus more on composition.
I really like the convenience of this wireless setup because there are no cables to trip over and that makes it really easy to move my lights around and try different angles. With a two flash setup, you can easily change the ratio between the two flash units on the back of the transmitter without touching anything else. This often helped me get better shots because I could quickly modify the light setup to capture a moment without stepping out from behind the camera.
I would prefer radio control but this setup is very compact and I did not have any problems with the Speedlites not firing even if they were not quite in direct line of sight. I even turned my shoot-through umbrellas around to act as reflectors, effectively blocking the line of site between the camera and the Speedlites, and they still fired so apparently there is a bit of flexibility in that line of site.
Update 5/25/2007: Although the STE2 worked well for portraits in relatively small rooms, I recently tried to use it for some wedding formals in large churches, reception halls, and outdoors and found it didn't work so well. Even after putting in brand new batteries, I was quite limited on where I could position my flashes so they would still fire. I had to have the flashes in front of me and just off to the sides for it to work. I have since decided to purchase some radio slaves for my wedding work. The other thing I noticed is that if you are shooting a bride in a white dress, E-TTL will tend to underexpose the shot so its value is diminished which makes non-TTL flashes and old-school metering for off camera formal work much more desirable.
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