One of my mine gripes with my existing Pocket Wizard Plus 2’s is that you often poked yourself in the eye with the enormous antenna on top of it when using an angle view finder, which i regularly shoot with.  So the decision came to buy the new Pocket Wizards.

Shamefully again retailers within Australia are pretending that we apparently have more money than the rest of the world and also whack on photography tax thus rendering it a useless activity purchasing in Australia so i hit up flEaBAY and was able to purchase the receiver and also the transmitter for less than purchasing the transmitter alone in Australia. Just to be extra safe i ordered the CE versions so they would work with my existing Pocket Wizards that i stupidly got ripped off buying in Sydney from a store who apparently only sells premium equipment, and thus charge stupid tax for it.  Heres looking at you L&P.

I started to read a couple of different sites on what is required and how to set it up and i found it (honestly) all a bit too hard to understand.  This could be 1 of 2 things.  1: im stupid.  2: they wrote it badly for average joe to understand.  I dare say its a mix of both.

My main point of reference were the pathetic tutorials on Pocket Wizards site which did nothing more than market the products (ermm guys i have already bought them, tell me how to set them up….) and another site from Tom Bol (here).  This is a rather famous site due to the Pocket Wizard article on it and so it should be as it was fairly easy to understand.

—————————————————————–

Thats the back story, the foreword is a simple tale of a simple person.  Me.   I didn’t care much for how hypersync worked and what it did and all that jazz, as much as its impressive its not relevant to me (possibly naive, however accepting of this).

This is what i have:

Canon 1dsmk3

Elinchrom Ranger RX AS Speed

Elinchrom Ranger A Heads

Pocket Wizard Mini TT1

Pocket Wizard Power ST4

EL-19374 Skyport Transceiver (better known as the bent adapter to plug skyports into the ranger pack due to an obvious design flaw).

Thats it.  There is no other wizardy here.

My simple instructions for anyone who wants to get into this are:

Purchase the appropriate transceiver (Mini TT1 or Flex 5) triggers for your canon / nikon camera.  Yes they have different versions. No you do not need the Flex 5 in order to do this but if you are made of cash go ahead (plus they have other benefits).

Purchase the Power ST4 Receiver

Purchase / Find your Skyport plug thing

Download the Pocket Wizard Update Utility [here]

Install the Pocket Wizard Update Utility

Plug in the Receiver / Transceiver and update their firmware.

Plug in the Power ST4 to your pack with the bent plug

Go back to your computer

Ensure you tick “Advanced Settings” down the bottom of the window whilst the Flex5 / MiniTT1 is attached

Goto the HyperSync tab and start to play.

Unfortunately this is where the basic ends and the trickery comes in.

Simply put, you need to fire your flash at a white wall until you find you get clipping from either the first or second curtain.  This is where you hit your theoretical maximum hypersync speed.  Feel free to use the slider to manually overwrite the settings as its all camera dependant.  Once you hit the sweet spot you (after many test fires) you are done.  Thats it.

Long story short, on my camera with a manual slider time of -1245milliseconds i was able to achieve a sync speed of 1/640 without issue.  at 1/800 i had a very slight curtain creep and would happily shoot at that speed if i had to and crop it out later.  Another note is that as i use A Heads, i hear that S Heads are “better” than the A Heads with Hyper Sync, good on them, unfortunately i dont have the cash to pony up for more heads at the moment but if anyone feels the need to donate me one im happy to accept it and will let you all know 🙂

———————————————————————————————

This is by all means a very quick and dirty way of getting HyperSync to work.  Im sure the PocketWizards can do far more than this and i applaud them in getting the technology into these devices.  If i have missed any steps please let me know and i will edit the post for others to see however keep in mind this is only for Hyper Sync and not to do with the setup of channels etc that i know you can do.

All in all, enjoy, and feel free to leave a comment telling me how jaded i am about Australian Retailers and how badly i wrote this tutorial 🙂

Enjoy – Dave.