Making an iTTL flash sync cord can save you nearly $50 over Nikon's equivalent.
Photography is the art of capturing light, be it made by the sun or the photographer. Hot-shoe flashes are popular producers of light, and a system like Nikon's i-TTL, which calculates the correct flash power on the fly, makes it as easy as pressing the shutter. But you'll quickly realize that an immobile light source harshly curtails your creative lighting ability. Getting the flash off the camera's hot shoe is possible, but to retain the iTTL functionality you'll need to shell out about $60 (as of early 2011) for Nikon's specially made cable --- that is, unless you make your own.
Instructions
1. Purchase or salvage the ends of an old hot-shoe flash sync cord. You need to make sure it has the same number of pins as your flash, and in the same configuration. If it doesn't, you can take it apart, drill holes and add pins, but this can be more trouble than its worth. You might as well build the ends from scratch.
2. Cut the connectors off the ends of your Cat 5 Ethernet cable.
3. Strip about 2 inches of the main insulation off the Ethernet cable on either end. Leave the insulation that shields each individual wire intact.
4. Solder the individual wires to the pins on one of the hot-shoe connectors. It doesn't matter which cable connects to which pin, only that the connections be the same on both sides.
5. Solder the wires onto the opposite hot-shoe connector, using the same configuration as you did the first one, matching the colored wires into the same exact layout that you used on the first connector.
6. Wrap the exposed connections in electrical tape to strengthen and protect them.
Tags: Ethernet cable, flash sync, flash sync cord, same configuration, sync cord