Alright, most of you are wondering if you can shoot on the cheap without having studio lighting but with controlled exposure as in a studio environment.

The answer is yes. And you don’t have to do this with an officially approved camera flash system.

Now for a start, all studio equipment are flash synced. This is done either with a cable or wirelessly. For the Olympus and Panasonic G series cameras, they do not come with wireless flash capability or with a studio flash sync port. But heck, you just need to get creative to achieve this.

First, you will need a wireless flash transmitter, You can get this with a pair of flash sync shoes for less than US$30 on eBay.

Flash triggers

This fits on top of your flash hot shoe and there is one that fits onto your flash. This is a 4 Channel  radio frequency trigger so you won’t need to worry about being in the line of sight of the Flash unit.

The wireless external flash adaptor has a standard hot shoe, so if you have a flash that is a decade old or newer, it will fit. So don’t go throwing away those old flash guns coz you can still use them.

This is what I did when I pair these units up. With it, you can connect up all your old flash guns and have to fire all at the same time. The trick is to temper the flash power so that your exposure isn’t overblown.

Now these flashguns can be set up anywhere, you do not need to have a studio environment to do this. The main thing to worry about is the position on where you can put these flash guns as obviously, a tight shooting space would mean you have to increase your aperture to a higher number at the expense of depth of field.

To even out the light, there is this gadget. This is a softbox which come with a rig to mount on a tripod.

Softbox option for flash gun and trigger

You can also get on eBay for around US$60 a pop. These are 60X60cm boxes and you will need to mount them on a rig that comes with it. The softbox rig itself comes complete with a ball head.

The ball head fits any standard studio lighting stand but you don’t need to buy one. The ball head is removable and the flash hotshoe on this rig comes with a screw mount that is Tripod friendly.

Just fit the wireless adaptor to the external flash (this is an old SB-24 Nikon Flash unit that is over a decade old) and you’re ready to mount it on the softbox rig.

the mounting rig that comes with the softbox

Once the rig is completed, it should look like this.

Finally, you need to attach the softbox to this rig and you’re ready to shoot wirelessly from just about anywhere. This can then be mounted on any tripod.

So there you have it, wireless studio lighting with an outdated external flash. This works with any G series or Pen camera.

To control the flash, you can do so by adjusting the power on the flash unit or use the aperture on your M4/3 camera. Now notice I did not use shutter speed. That is because most flash units have a flash sync of about 1/200 sec tops. Shoot any faster than that will mean that your images will not be exposed within half the frame. So stick with a lower shutter speed than 1/200 and you’re on safe ground.

Furthermore you need to switch your controls to either manual or shutter priority (set say at a safe 1/180 sec). This way you can vary the intensity of the flash using the aperture and ISO selection.

Take a couple of test shots to know the lighting intensity and slow down. The flash recycling time is dependent on your batteries. By shooting slowly, you can get a better refresh rate. So remember not to go crazy ok?