With the right cord and settings, the Pocket Wizards can act as a wireless remote trigger in addition to trigger any off camera flashes. You’ll find that the ease of setup and the flexibility it will provide you will go beyond just doing a self-portrait and you may be able to integrate it into client work. Now, this how-to is going to cover the basics to get the Pocket Wizards setup and what you will need to get this work correctly.

What you Need

At a minimum, you’ll need three Pocket Wizards; one for the camera, one for your flashes and one hand held. This number is assuming you’ll be using an off-camera flash. If you are using natural light and/or no flashes, then two Pocket Wizards will do the trick.

You will also need a Pocket Wizard motor drive cable or an eBay equivalent. Essentially you’ll need a miniphone to whatever motor drive port is on your camera. The official Pocket Wizard website refers to these cables as “remote camera cables.” For me, I have a Canon 5D, so I need a cable with a Canon N3 connector.

See the photo to the left. This is the same port that you would use if you had a corded remote trigger. This is all the equipment you will need to fire your camera wireless using Pocket Wizards.

Setup

The first few times I tired to do this, my photos were coming out dark, although the flashes were firing and the camera was setup correctly. After some research and digging, I discovered that there is one key setting that can be easily over looked that will cause this issue, but I will cover that below.

First, on the top of the pocket wizard there are two ports: Camera/Flash and Flash. Typically, when I am using the Pocket Wizards to just fire a flash, I run a miniphone to PC port to my flash or miniphone to miniphone. I plug the miniphone end of the cord into the one labeled ‘flash’ and the other end into the flash, mount a Pocket Wizard to the hotshoe on the camera and I am ready to go.

With this wireless trigger setup, you’ll have to use the Camera/Flash port instead with the new remote camera cable. Setup is simple; mount the Pocket Wizard in the hot shoe as you normally would and plug in the remote camera cable into the motor port on your camera and the miniphone plug into the Camera/Flash port on the Pocket Wizard. Set the channel to 1 and the Transmit mode is set to ‘both’.

Next, if you are using a flash, setup up the Pocket Wizard as you normally would. Cord from the flash to the Pocket Wizard, plugged into the port labeled ‘flash’. Here is the gotcha I mentioned above, make sure you set the channel to 2 and Transmit Mode to ‘both’. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but this is how it works. Only the flashes need be on channel 2, the camera Pocket Wizard and the hand held Pocket Wizard need to be on channel 1.

With a Pocket Wizard in hand, press the ‘test’ button and your camera and flashes will fire. If the response seems sluggish from when you press the ‘test’ button to when the camera fires (or doesn’t fire), check your Pocket Wizards batteries. Again, make sure if you are using a flash, that the Pocket Wizard connected to the flash is set to channel 2!

And that is it, setup is done and happy shooting.