Author: mark

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Flash Sync Speeds with Cowboy Studio Wireless Triggers

I did some searching online and didn’t find a clear answer to this question.

How fast the Canon Rebel T2i sync with a flash (both wired and wireless)?

I finally read that the max sync speed is 1/200th of a second.  I couldn’t believe how slow that is.  I read that it’s the same for the Nikon D80 which makes sense because it’s in the same price range.  I did some testing and found this to be true both of the built-in flash and of wireless sync using the amazingly priced Cowboy Studio NPT-04 wireless trigger.  I was able to shoot at 1/250th when the flash was off-camera but the bottom of the frame was a tad dark from the closing shutter.  Using the 430EX II on camera in high-speed mode (not second curtain mode) I was able to shoot at 1/4000th of a second.  I tried my shot with and without the flash and it definitely synced because it lit up the shot.  When reviewing the shot, the camera says that it was taken at 1/4000th.  This is awesome for high-speed sports photography but how can we do this off-camera?  What if I want to shoot a high-speed vault with a side light, or a back light?  So far, I’ve seen the Pocket Wizards that support high-speed TTL off camera flash sync but $375 is a bit pricey in my opinion just to be able to sync a single flash.

Do you know of a better alternative on a budget?

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FIXED: Firefox 6+ and Slow Browsing on Lion

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I recently upgraded to MacOS X Lion.  Shortly after that Firefox automatically updated to v6.  I began to experience slow DNS lookups.

When you enter a URL into your web browser or click a link to a web page, the first thing it does is ask your DNS servers where that URL points to.  Specifically it is looking for the domain name (domainname.com, .net, .org, etc).  The DNS server then responds with an IP address which points your browser to it’s target destination which allows the downloading to begin.

For the sake of speed optimization, many websites today use more than one web server to deliver their images and various other files on their pages.  One web page may have 3 or more different domains to resolve.  If each DNS look up takes 2 seconds, you are looking at 6 seconds of lookup time!  Say nothing about the download time.  This is why it’s a good to use a service like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS.  Often, doing so will noticeably speed up web browsing.

In my particular situation Firefox was trying to take advantage of IPv6 before trying IPv4 which is good and bad.  Good for the future of the internet but bad for today’s internet because IPv6 is not in use everywhere yet.

PROBLEM:

  • Firefox 6 slow DNS lookups due to priorization of IPv6 over IPv4

THE FIX:

  1. Enter “about:config” into the URL bar
  2. Click “I’ll be careful, I promise”
  3. Enter “DNS” in the filter (just below the URL)
  4. Double-click on “network.dns.disableIPv6” in the list, setting the value to “True”
  5. Close and restart Firefox

This dramatically increased the speed of my web browsing.  I tested this by enabling and disabling the setting several times just to make sure it wasn’t a network hiccup or somehow related to OpenDNS since I use them.