A Star is Born!

Let's start at the beginning. It's been a open secret that both on and off camera flash was a bit of a after thought to those boffins tucked away at Fujifilm HQ back in Japan which has left many X-Pro photographers scratching their heads looking for a better alternative than what was officially on offer from Fuji. A couple of months ago I came across this YouTube video from a Cambridgeshire based photographer, Matt Widgery and I was perplexed by his conclusions regarding the X-Pro 1 and the Yongnuo RF 603c single pin radio trigger as regards off camera flash and the X-Pro 1. Simply put, poor Matt couldn't get any of his YN setup's (either Canon or Nikon) to work with his X-Pro 1 and I could. So I posted a comment and before I knew it, I was invited to appear on his show:  

From there on, things progressed at lightning speed because I had also been doing my own laboratory testing of various OCF combinations with my X-Pro 1 which included the Canon 580mk2's, the fully dedicated Nissin i40 and the Shanny SN600c speedlights, along with my set of Yongnuo YN622c/TX and RF603c radio triggers and various makes of eTTL off camera flash cables, when I struck GOLD with the Shanny speedlights and the Yongnuo 622c/TX. 

What I had found was that I could not only successfully trigger my Shanny flashgun and fully remotely control it's power, ratio,  flash

compensation and zoom settings from a YN622tx sat in the hotshoe of the camera, set in manual mode, I could also do exactly the same thing (and here is the kicker) in TTL mode. I had discovered the X-Pro 1's OCF holy grail. So with this in hand I set off down the A10 to a Cambridgeshire village, stuck in the middle of nowhere to do my first YouTube broadcast. 

Let me tell you, making a video is bloody hard work (just remembering your lines takes it's toll) and Matt did a wonderful job of taking me step by step through the process and showing me what was going on in terms of lights, camera (sound) and action. One day, stretched into two but eventually everything was shot, rendered and uploaded. Here are the results!  I am now in the process of publishing my own and first YouTube but more on this later. Enjoy......