Nikon Creative Lighting System Dreams

Last week Nikon released a new flash unit, the SB-910 . I was a little disappointed. I wanted something different.

First of all, I am a huge fan a a dedicated user of Nikon's Creative Lighting System. I currently own a SB-900, SB-700, SB-600 and an SU-800 and I have a burned out SB-800 that served me well for years. I used my system this morning to shoot a head shot of Ken Bissell who was the University Photographer at Harding University when I was a student back in the late 80's. I learned a great deal about photography by watching Ken and what he did when I was a student.

I am not the Strobist, this is just a simple main light in a shoot through umbrella and a reflector fill on Ken and a background light to provide separation. Shot with a D3s with a 70-200VR lens and the Su-800 controlling the flash units.

That gets me to my dream. I have mentioned before that I really want a SU-800R and a couple of SB-900R and SB-700R flash units. The "R" stands for radio. Now I know that you can do this with after market radio slaves like Pocketwizzards and RadioPoppers . But the Nikon stuff works so smoothly I don't want to have to add anything on. I want the radio part built in to the existing products. I am not talking about 2000ft ranges or anything here. I would like wireless radio control of my flash units out to maybe 100 ft and most of the time I could live with 50 ft.

I am not delusional enough to believe that anyone at Nikon would actually read this and get busy, I bet they already have people working on it as I type this blog post.

Publish Post I was glad to see that the SB-910 has the clip on color modifiers like the SB-700 has for tungsten and fluorescent light balancing. When I replaced my burned up SB-800 I chose the SB-700 over another SB-900 just for those rigid light modifiers.

If the aftermarket boys want to get busy they can figure those out for the SB-600 and the SB-900 and I will be a customer.