I picked up a VERY cheap slave flash a while back, it doesn't have anything really in the way of controls unless you count the "computer" that apparently meters the flash. It's brilliant, an SC 18 Wotan Servo flash, and even came in the original packaging, all for a tenner from Arundel Photographica.

http://www.arundel-photographica.co.uk/

It's a brilliant shop if you've never been and great fun to visit and browse through some really rare and unusual photographic equipment.

The best part of the package is the fact that it was designed as an 'off-camera' flash and has a screw fitting on the bottom to attach to a plate screwed to the bottom of your camera. This fits the standard tripod screw thread so I've stuck it on my gorilla pod tripod where it looks a bit war of the world-ish and fits anywhere where I need a spare flash.

Anyway, I gave it a whirl and decided to photograph water dripping from a tap. It took a little while to get the flash and light levels right, I used an on-camera flash as a trigger for the Wotan because the pop-up flash can't be convinced not to do a pre-flash. The second problem was balancing the light output from the Wotan through a combination of aperture and moving it further away. As far as I can tell the light metering computer on the Wotan doesn't do anything so I left it covered, the instruction manual would have you believe it's an amazing next step in flash technology which is charming, but it doesn't really do a lot.

It was more of an opportunity to play than anything else, but lots of fun and I tried a slow shutter speed of 1/6 s, a narrow aperture of 32 and iso 100 to see if the flash could freeze the action and leave a little bit of blur.

The first few pictures I tried (some earlier pictures of flowers not shown here) had fairly harsh shadows so I bounced the on camera flash (a jessops 360afds) of a nearby white wall and this filled out those shadows quite nicely. I later bounced both flashguns of the ceilings and walls and while a bit soft for these water photos it will be handy for product photography and possible weddings.

This picture shows the benefit of using a slow shutter with flash, you can see the trail from the water drips as well as a couple of frozen drips in mid-air. It took more than a few shots to get the splash as well as the drips but it was a fun experiment and it's good to see a couple of bits of 'water shrapnel' flying away from the splash.

Finally I turned of both flashes to see what a fast shutter speed could do and although the Sony a200 and Sigma 24-70 struggled to find a focus point on the water I liked the result. I've given it a LOT of contrast in photoshop and it's not as sharp as I would like but it's a decent black and white.

Some of these pictures will be appearing soon on my website;

www.edwardbryan.co.uk