All right, so you've got everything put together. And now you have to figure out how do we make this stuff work. So what we have is our light stand setup that we did before, except we took the umbrella off so we can see what's going on. With the flash on top look at the trigger right in between our speedlight mount and our stand. Now, you may or may not have this piece right here, the trigger depending on if you're using the wind 560 dashboards that we talked about that have the triggers built in. But for this example, we'll use the external trigger and this could be my cactus v fives, or it could be the only little triggers that we talked about, or really any other type of trigger.

This is always going to be the place that it goes right underneath the spotlight. So for the sake of the cactus Five, the first thing you have to do is set it to receive their transceivers, which means that they can either transmit or they can receive depending on what you want them to do, which makes them really versatile. Instead of having a dedicated transmitter and a dedicated receiver, which some trigger sets do have. So let's turn this on, we're going to flip this switch back to the RX position, there's RX and TX Rx, meaning received TX meaning transmit, and this is going to be receiving, because what's gonna happen is we're gonna use another trigger to tell this trigger to pop this flash. So we've got this turned on and receive and the order this doesn't really matter, but you can turn the trigger on you could turn the speed light on first, it doesn't matter.

And we're going to turn the speed light on so we're going to hold the on off button. We let it go makes a couple of funny noises. And then the LCD on the back is going to be on and our pilot light will be green initially. And then once the batteries charged up the flashlight turns red. That means we're ready to go. This pilot light also doubles as our test light for the flash is kind of a pain to push on the news for whatever reason.

So you might not even feel like it's a button, but it is give it a good hard push. And you'll see that flash pop. And you also have another light down here right below the pilot light, which is essentially your recharge light so that lights going to turn red really quickly, and it's going to go back off. And while it does that, it's recharging the flash and telling you you need to wait before you can pop this flash again, because I'm not going to do anything until I'm charged. And so that's going to vary depending on how strong of a flash you have set to. So right now we're on 130 second, which is pretty low power.

But if I bump this up by pressing the right hand button right here, you can't see it on my screen but the trigger value is going up. Flash value apologies are going up and now I'm at one over one which is full power. So if I press this test button again, it's a lot brighter and that list is on for a little bit longer. So we're gonna go back down to a low power just for this example. So now you got the seven sore flashes on our trigger set to receive. And the last piece of this on this end is this side of the trigger has what's known as a channel dial.

And it's got numbers on it one through 16. And the channels allow you to fire different flashes and not the others and basically selectively fire the flashes that you have. In our case, we only have one external off camera flash right now. But if we had maybe three flashes, we could put them on separate channels. And then from our trigger, say I only want to pop this one or I only want to pop this one, I really want to pop this one by controlling the channel on the transmitter. For our simple test, we're going to put it on channel one.

And then we're going to take our other trigger, which is the same exact thing as as the one that's on here. So we're going to set this one to transmit. So in the flip that same switch over to TX, and then we're going to make sure that our channel dial is also on one. That means they're going to be talking on the same channel which is what we want and so the first We want to do once we have this on set to channel one, and this on instead of channel one is we're going to test and on the V fives and every trigger has this button in a different place but there's usually one button on a on a DME trigger and it's the test button and so on the V fives, it's right over here. So when I press this, this trigger is going to talk to this trigger and tell the flash to fire off face this this way so you can see the flash and I'm gonna press this button and the flash fires, no wires, and we're almost there.

So that's not very helpful because this doesn't really take a picture. So we want to do is take our camera, any DSLR doesn't matter the brand can be a mirrorless camera assaults you have a standard hot shoe. And be careful because there are a couple camera brands that use a different hot shoe I believe Sony might be one of them. But just check your your hardware before you start attaching things to your camera. But for Nikon and Canon for sure these are fine. Everything is made for that.

Take care This, put it on your hot shoe as if it were alight, but it's not. So you just slide that on. And then there's a dial or attorney wheel that lets you tighten the pressure on that. So now we're attached. And I don't have a lens on this camera, it doesn't matter for this test, we're just letting the camera fire the trigger. And we're not actually taking a picture.

But what's gonna happen now is I turned my camera on. And then this is still on, and this is on and I'm gonna press the shutter button. And you'll see that the flash triggers because every time I take a picture of the camera, it sends a message up to the hot shoe that says fire, whatever is on top of that hot shoe, you need to fire and in this case, the trigger is waiting for that signal. And once it gets it it essentially relays that signal over to the other trigger and fires the flash which is not attached to your camera. So that's the basic concept of firing off camera flashes. It's pretty simple, especially when you're only using one.

But really you could have three other flashes as long as you all set them to channel one every time time you press this trigger button, all three flashes will flash exactly the same time. And now you have the freedom to put these anywhere and do lots of creative things with your light setups. If you want to put a flash on top of your camera, as well as having an off camera flash, there's still a hot shoe on top of the trigger, which allows you to also mount a light on top of that. So when you take the picture, not only will it trigger the off camera flash or however many that you have, it's also going to trigger the spotlight that is mounted to the top of your camera. So that's an extra step of versatility that you have. And you may or may not want that light coming from the camera but at least gives you the option, you can attach it you can just turn that light off and you'll still find the off camera flashes.

There's all sorts of things that you can do to get different looks with the same setup. So the only thing I want to make a note of is that you'd want to have some type of modifier in this in most cases, like the umbrella that we talked about, but that doesn't affect in the electronics. You just stick the umbrella in there and you modify your light point that day. And now you've got a nice soft light source that you can position anywhere you want. So we just talked about how you can find the flashes when use an external triggers. But I want to make one quick note about not using any triggers and having the triggers be internal the flashlight with the wind 560 dashboards, I'm not going to get into crazy detail about what buttons to push on the flashes and what menus to get into to get them all set.

But I want to give you the general idea and just show you the hardware setup when you are in that situation. And you'll notice what I have here is our light stand setup. There's no trigger in between the speed light stand and the speed light itself. And then on my camera, rather than having the trigger on top, I've got my speed light mounted directly to my camera. And what I'm going to end up doing is all the control about who's talking to who and what flash power and things like that is going to happen directly on my wire and 560 dash four. And once they're set up properly, they're going to essentially talk directly to each other without any triggers in between either Have these and for a lot of detail on that you can just check the manual for the 560 dashboard, it's going to tell you how you can actually set the power for the external flashes, set them up on separate channels, set them up on all different things that you have options to do.

And it's very, very, very versatile and it's very lightweight as far as setup goes because you've got a stand, a mount and a light and another light in your camera. And you now have a two light setup wherever you go and it's wireless. So highly recommended, but I just want to show you what it looks like when there is no trigger in the mix.