How have I managed to synch at 1/320 with no HSS, & off camera 580EXII...???

[AlexHare]

Hi everyone

I was doing a shoot for this lady (attached) and I realised after a couple of frames I was shooting at 1/320s, ISO400, f4 with my flash fired wirelessly via a Skyport. It looks fine-there's no flash synch speed issue with it-which is really odd!

How on earth did I avoid any 'dark banding' on the frame from this speed being well above the flash synch for my camera? In a studio setting I've seen the black second curtain appear at a 1/200. I soon changed the settings to shoot at 1/160 but this shot is fine and makes me wonder if it's something to do with firing wirelessly with the Skyport rather than via the cameras hotshoe...

This has nothing to do with High Speed Synch (HSS) as my flash was in Manual mode and this was not set to come on.

[colin C]

Re: How have I managed to synch at 1/320 with no HSS, & off camera 580EXII...???

I would suggest that if you were in a dark room and used the flash as the main source of light above your normal synch speed, you would get the black banding. However, in this sample shot you appear to be using the flash as fill-in to the shadows, as there appears to be sufficient light for the main shot anyway. Using your flash intelligently as you have, rather than have black banding, the only consequence is that where the banding would have been in my example above, your shadows won't be filled in. Most people wouldn't notice the difference.

Well done for noticing the wrong settings and changing them - many of us don't find out until after the shoot.

Colin