Yongnou YN565EX

Recently I traded in my Canon 550D for the Canon 650D for the built in wireless control.  When I tried out the wireless flash control with my Canon 430EX and Canon 550EX flash guns and I was very impressed.  I love to be able to use ETTL flash and full manual control wirelessly.  After that I wanted a third flash gun with wireless flash control, but do want to pay the high cost of a Canon EX flash gun.  I’ve seen a few reports of an ETTL compatible flash gun from Younnuo called YN565EX.   It is the same physical size and power of the Canon 580EX but similar control interface of the Canon 430EX.  It cannot act as a wireless commander and cannot do high speed flash sync.  After some investigation on various online forums, I decided to order one.

Delivery was quick from an eBay seller.  Inside the package there is the flash gun, a Chinese/English instruction, a pouch and plastic stand for mounting on a tripod.  All I can say is it works perfectly.  I tested it mounted on the camera and off camera as a wireless slave, both in ETTL and manual modes.  When I checked the power, it has a full stop more power than my Canon 550EX flash gun.  I am very happy with this purchase and can’t wait to test it on a photo shoot coming up.

I was able to use the flash on a shoot a few days after receiving it.  The occasion was the celebration of a 50th wedding anniversary family gathering.  It was held at the Ritz Hotel in London.  I was given 30 minutes in an area of the hotel to photography the family.  With the time constrain, I decided against using my Strobeam DL4 and shot wireless TTL using my Canon 650D  as the commander.  As well as the YN565EX, I had a Canon 550EX also in slave mode.  Both flashes were mounted in an umbrella bracket with shoot through umbrellas.  It all went to plan and the results were very good.  Shooting wireless TTL enabled me to work a lot faster.  Overall I am very happy with the results.  Here are a photo from this shoot.

Update 24th April 2013: Recently I had the chance to test my YN-565EX with a Phottix Odin wireless trigger system and can confirm they are not compatible with each other.  When mounted on the receiver, the zoom can be controlled and when the test button is pressed, the flash does fire.  How ever, the flash does not fire, in both ETTL or manual mode, when the shutter button was pressed.  That was a disappointment as I was hoping they will work together as I would like to purchase a set of Odin soon.

Christmas Party Images With E-PM1 & Panasonic 20mm F1.7

Just had a Christmas night out with my work mates.  It was at The Roadhouse in Convent Garden in London.  The venue is a bar/night club where we had a meal, some dancing and live band.  The place was very dark.  The camera auto white balance normally work very well, but on this occasion, it just did not work well.  I had to set up a custom white balance and set the ISO to 2000 and lens wide open at F1.7.  I decided not to use flash as it would be difficult to balance the flash with ambient lighting.  The Panasonic 20mm F1.7 lens did struggle to focus sometimes in the dark condition.

Here are some of the shots.  There is noise, but it did remarkably well and  I am very happy.  All images were shot on RAW and converted using Olympus Viewer 2 and then down sized for web.