I have used used Elinchrom Skyports for the last four or five years as my flash triggers. Sadly they are now getting a bit tired and battered so it was time for a change. I looked at the various options and was attracted by the Yongnuo 560-III flashes with built in receivers paired to the RF-603 transmitters. Having receivers built in to my off camera flashes will save time, should remove a point of failure and basically should make my like easier. I am not interested in TTL for off camera flash so this seemed the perfect solution for me. Whilst shopping around for the best price I found someone selling a pair of used 560-iii's for the bargain price of £50. I ordered a set of 603 mk2 transmitters and am now ready to give the things a good test. The flashes are much better made than I was expecting - the build quality is good but what I am really interested in is the performance. It would be good to check the range and for this I needed somewhere long straight and level. Living near to the coast I decided on Deal pier as my test track - according to Wikipedia it is 311m long.
We set one of the 560's on a light stand at the sea end of the pier and decided to walk back towards the shore taking a picture every ten metres to check the range. To measure the distance we used Triggertrap - the dongle plugged into my phone and camera with the app running in Distance Lapse mode. This means that at every 10 metre interval the app would fire the camera. Triggertrap gives a nice graphical countdown so I could see exactly when the camera was going to fire.
I set off down the pier expecting to get around halfway but at every interval the flash fired without a single miss.I was soon at the opposite end of the pier with 300m between the transmitter and receiver and had effectively run out of space. I walked through the gate and out as fas as the road and the set up still worked seamlessly.
I couldn't go any further so we went for an ice cream. It is back to the drawing board for the distance test - I need somewhere flat level and over 300m! Look out for the next instalment.
