Some weeks ago I ordered some Pixel Opas flash triggers. To cut a long story short the Pixel Opas is a manual flash trigger in transceiver design. They replaced my old RF-602 and I'll add a short review of them later. But that blog entry is more about creating my own lightening for an event.

If I photograph an event I want to capture the mood of the event. Basically I want people to look at the pictures and get the feeling they have to be there the next time. I try to achieve this by creating colorful images. But normally the light situation does not allows those kind if images. Usually you have a lot of disco lightning stuff around but you can't rely on them. If you don't aim directly to the stage and capture the lights there you'll probably end up with pictures showing bright people in front of a boring dark background.

My solution for this is using flashes for the background. I gel them to get the color I want and trigger them remotely. This way you can create beautiful background light and get rid of boring dark background. See the following images for example.

Background lightning example with remote flash triggers

For the image above I used four speedlites. They've been mounted to light stands and had gels attached. For this kind of lighning the YN-460 speedlites are very handy. They are relatively cheap and powerful enough. Using some Gorilla Pods allowed me to attach them in areas where you can't use a light stand. And finally the new Pixel Opas triggers have proven to be more reliable then the RF-602 on this distance.