Hey Nikoneers, I'm about to buy my first speed light.

[inkista]

That's awesome! Most pre-flash syncing with optical slaves mean they can only ignore a single pre-flash (as with iTTL), vs. multiple preflashes (like CLS commander/slave communication uses).

The line-of-sight stuff isn't that bad, indoors in a studio situation where the commander signal can be bounced, plus the head on the SB-700 swivels the full 360 degrees, so you can always have the CLS slave sensor on the side (it's the round dot above the battery door) pointed towards your camera. The main problem is light placement behind the camera can get iffy.

[Loose Canon]

Congratulations on your new acquisition David! Very cool!

The line-of-sight stuff isn't that bad

Unfortunately, my experience with optical triggering line-of-sight hasn’t been so happy!

I have set up for optical triggering just to test the theory and could never get out of the test phase. Never mind pull an actual shoot.

It works as long as everything is set up in a “clinical” way favoring what everything can “see”. In real world shooting this happens in my studio exactly none and the additional fussing to try to make it happen just wasn’t worth the effort. And this even when triggering the speedlight using RF. That was the only reliable firing I ever got.

Start stuffing speedlights into modifiers, having strobes behind modifiers and flags or even diffusers, tightly controlled directional light, low power output then the failure rate goes through the roof. Start adding lights and the odds get worse. For me the results were so unreliable as to make it impossible.

I wish you better luck than I have had with an optical set-up David, but I’d figure in a more reliable triggering system myself. Get your speedlight outside and it’s going to be even worse.

[Texas Dave]

Yeah Terry, under some of the circumstances you mentioned I could see it not working. The sensors on the back of the elinchroms are protruding dome like sensors so they probably trigger better than what is on the speed light. I'm sure I'll find the limits here shortly and I appreciate the luck wished my way!