For those of you who want to remote control your manual DSLR flash, there’s an easy circuit you can make and control the intensity of the flash and the flash itself with a remote control.
I know the DSLR world charges a ton of money for simple stuff life this, here’s how you can beat that world and do it yourself.
For me, an ideal strobist flash would be an extremely cheap manual flash that you can control remotely. Extremely cheap and remote control?! I am surely asking too much! But why is that too much to ask? It doesn’t even have to be RF control – it can be IR. All that the manufacturer has to do is to add a IR demodulator chip (probably something like $0.1 when bought in large quantities) and make a slight firmware change to the flash uC (almost free). The Chinese IR remotes are something like $2-$3 so they could sell a remote-control-enabled flash basically without raising the price! When in 2010 someone like David Hobby, who is very passionate about the use of a manual flash and who can probably afford any flash he likes, has to walk a few meters and lower the light stand just to change the flash power…. and the cheap remote technology has been around for more than 20 years… it certainly seems like a huge missed opportunity.
To prove the point I have set out to build a cheap IR remote for my YN460 flash.
