In my frustration at not having decent off-camera flash capabilities after inadvertently destroying my Vivitar 285HV a few months ago, I turned my attention to the only other flash I had lying around. A Vivitar god-knows-what-it’s-really-old-and-rather-crappy. I think it’s a 2800 or something. It’s supposed to be a dedicated flash for the Olympus OM series, but it really has no purpose sitting on the top of a modern camera. In fact, I’m not sure it had much of a purpose sitting on top of an Olympus back in the day, but I digress.

This flash is rather poor for off-camera flash work. It has two powers: 1/8 and full. Full power is rather anemic compared to other strobes because we’re operating off of two AA batteries with this thing. In additon, the sync voltage on this flash is probably way to high for modern electrical cameras, so radio flash triggering is a must. I dug out the unreliable Cactus POS triggers that I was using before my 285 hit the dirt concrete. I had thought that they were both dead — out of battery juice. In fact, one of them was still going if you held down the battery case door. So, with a little bit of gaffers tape I was rollin’ with my one flash. Hey, it’s better than nothing. Here are some pictures from the shoot. The concept I was going for (the second photo of the two) didn’t turn out because of highlights from the moon and streetlight, but I had some fun anyway. Thanks to Kurt for the assistance..

Self Portrait in a swimming pool

Studio umbrella floating in a swimming pool