Peanuts!

Before I invested in my collection of Elinchrom Skyports I bought some Wein peanuts to use as optical triggers for my flash. At £15 for a pack of three from The Flash Centre it was quite a bargain or so I thought at the time. But I really didn't get on with them. They really weren't very easy to attach to my SB28 flash guns and the connection to the PC cord was quite unreliable so I soon gave up on them.

David Hobby at strobist.com recommends the Nikon SB26 because it has a built in optical trigger, but they are as rare as hens teeth. In fact they are rarer than hens teeth because if I do a search on ebay for Hens Teeth I get 5 hits and for the Nikon SB26 I get none. So an SB28 plus an optical trigger is a much more viable option, at least here in the UK.

So fast forward to last night. I was experimenting with High Speed sync and dug out the peanuts because I wanted to see if I could sync with the HSS optically. (Its a long story) I realised that a recently purchased flash mount was ideal for attaching a wein peanut. There are no dangling cables and it seems that the connection it is a lot more stable. Which makes them more of an option to use with my other flashguns.

The flash mount is a Sonia all purpose hot shoe, three piece kit, that I got from Colin's Foto Electrico on ebay for £9.99. Its a solid piece of kit, which is a shame because I wanted to open one up and mod it. It has a hot shoe with two female PC connectors and one male, plus a test button. It also has a cold shoe with a tripod mount. They supply it with a little male-male pc cable as well.

The Wein peanut fits nicely in one of the sockets and the whole thing looks rather spiffy all joined together, like it was meant to be there.