Laws of Light: Overpower the sun with high-speed sync

posted Friday, September 14, 2018 at 2:30 PM EDT

As part of Jay P. Morgan’s ongoing Laws of Light video series, his latest video is all about high speed sync. High-speed sync strobes allow you to shoot at shutter speeds faster than your camera’s built-in flash sync, which often ranges from 1/160s to 1/250s. If you are shooting outside in bright light, particularly with fast lenses, a camera’s built-in flash sync will often not be quick enough. That’s where high-speed sync comes in.

In the video below, Morgan shows off to utilize high-speed sync and illustrates the advantages of high-speed sync in an outdoor daytime scenario. We want to fully understand what high-speed sync is, what it can do and finally, how to set it up. High-speed sync is essentially the ability to sync off-camera strobes to your camera when it is set to shutter speeds faster than the camera’s flash sync shutter speed. You want to utilize this feature of your lights when the ambient light of a scene is too bright for your camera’s fastest flash sync shutter speed. For example, suppose you’re shooting in a bright scene and you want to use a fast aperture such as f/1.4 or f/2.8 in order to get a nice blurred background in your portrait shot, your camera might need a shutter speed as fast as 1/4000s or 1/8000s in order to create a proper exposure at that aperture. A flash sync speed of 1/250s won’t cut it and you will need high-speed sync.