As many photographers often do, I cut corners to save money on my equipment.  Sometimes this works out really well for me.  Other times it is a complete disaster.

Case in point, my lighting kit. Some would argue that the quality of the light that we work with is more important than the cameras or the lenses. And I would tend to agree! As artificial light gives us far more control over the quality of our lighting, it is common for photographers to employ the use of elaborate lighting setups rather than harnessing the power of the sun.

In the old days, a series of cables might be run from the camera to all of the lights to tell the flashes precisely when to fire.  These days, it is much more common to use radio triggers, which eliminate all of the wires and generally make it faster to set up and tear down a lighting setup for a shoot.

One of the common money saving tricks is to fire one flash by radio and then use an optical sensor to trigger all of the other flashes. For my radio system, a radio receiver is about $100 but an optical trigger is about $40 (and an even cheaper one is available for around $20!)  This is the route that I took, and initially it worked pretty well.

But now my radio receiver is the only trigger that works! The optical slaves have completely quit working. So until I remedy this, I can only work with one light. A good photographer can accomplish quite a lot with only one light, but most of the time the look that we’re going for will require three or more lights.

So now I’m out the $40 each for the optical triggers that no longer work, plus the $100 each that I should have spent initially for the radio triggers (and another $20 each for the special cable to mate the radio receiver to my particular type of flash). I have no doubts that my lighting gear will be working better than ever after all of the new equipment comes in, but in the meantime I’ve been hesitant to schedule any photo shoots knowing how limiting it will be to work with only a single flash.

Quite often when we think we’re saving money up-front, we’re actually paying more in the end (once for the cheap solution, and then once again to do it correctly).

For anyone that is wondering, the junk products that I will never use again are Wein HS (Hot Shoe) slaves. The radio triggers that have been working 100% for me are Elinchrom Skyports.