Action Sports Cartel

Last night a friend and I tried what we thought would be an awesome idea:

We wanted to shoot the exact same shot from two angles using all of our strobes combined. Unfortunately, I couldn't find my batteries, and he was short one of his cable adapters, so we were already limited to using 3 strobes rather than 5. The idea, though, would be that my camera would be working as a remote, and would be triggered by his camera when he releases his shutter.

It worked, except that there was a split second delay and I could see the flashes going off before my shutter opened. So, my friend was getting the shot and I was just getting natural light.

Anyone know if there's a workaround with this? We'd like to try it again some time. The only time I got to use strobes was after he was satisfied with what he had and decided to shoot video for the last attempt. My last photo was the only one with the strobes, and I'm happy with how it turned out, but we'd still like to try again with both of us shooting.

Here's the end result, which was stomped by the way:



We used 4 PW Plus II transceivers with one PW Plus receiver, 3 285HV flashes, and my camera was being triggered with a Plus II with a cable running to my camera to trigger. Everything worked with the exception of the delay. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

if you trigger both cameras using pocket wizards they might sync (if you are lucky to have two perfectly identically functioning cameras -not likely)

If you buy pocket wizard multimax, trigger both cameras using PWs, delay the camera thats opening earlier

Shoot when its dark, long shutter speed and try to trigger the strobes manually while both cams are open

on the photo; no really understanding why you used that composition. what is the massive arrow on the right doing for ya?
props on the idea

No thought to the composition really, about 10 seconds of time to run into place and my first time using a (borrowed) fisheye lens. I was hoping to be closer to get most of the graffiti out of the shot (ie; the arrow), but didn't want to get too close to avoid a flying deck if he fell foward. The lens was much wider than I expected, I ran into place as if I were shooting my 17-40. I think the lens I was borrowing was a Tokina 10-17 so I ended up just firing rather than asking Ryan to wait as he was running on pure adrenaline.

No MultiMax units, so I'm thinking we'll just have to ditch the idea. Longer shutter wouldn't make a difference as the flashes are still firing before the remote camera's shutter opens. No rear curtain sync with Plus II units of course. Only possibility would be using the "remote" camera independently from PWs and just triggering the shutter manually before the flashes are triggered and using a slow shutter to catch the flash burst. May be tricky to get the timing right, but could work.

you can do it all with plusIIs however there are limitations. You are going to have to severly compromise on the sync speed with one of the cameras so probably wont be much good at overpowering the sun.
You run the first camera as the trigger cam with a longer shutter speed - you have to experiment to find out just how long - maybe like 1/100th or possibly slower. It has a PW on the same channel as PW on camera 2s hotshoe (also plugged into the remote socket). this Pw needs to be in relay mode, with all the flashes on the next channel up so that camera 2 triggers the flashes after it has been remotely triggered itself.
The sync speed on the first camera is limited by the PW delay (x2) and the shutter delay of camera 2.

I hope even a little bit of that makes sense haha.