West Hartford, US
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bstimpson:
I think you may have a bit of confusion about some of the operations and concepts. I will try to (briefly) explain; forgive me if I am misunderstanding your question and you already know all of this.
Firstly, you note that "I just found out that everything has to be in Manual because CLS doesnt work with the preflashes." Actually, this is not correct. CLS DOES work with the preflashes; the whole point of the preflashes is to accomplish several things: 1) trigger the remote units to fire their own preflashes, which along with any preflashes from the master are used to compute exposure, and then 2) tell the remotes what power to use for their output and then to trigger that output during the actual exposure. The camera needs these exposure determining preflashes because it has no idea where in relation to camera or subject the remotes are placed, and so needs them to fire to determine their effect on subject illumination. With a single on-camera flash in TTL mode, the autofocus distance (or manually set distance on the lens) tells the camera the camera-to-subject distance, but would misread if the flash were, for instance, off camera but connected via a SB-29 cord, so again a preflash is used to determine proper TTL exposure. This was handled differently in film days, but I digress).
In any case, when you are using CLS, you can set the remote flashes to essentially any mode that they support: TTL, AA, manual. If you set the remotes to manual, then the CLS preflashes just serve to communicate to the remotes what manual setting you have chosen. You set the manual output on your master/commander unit. You can chose to fire said remotes and meter with your Sekonic if you like. You can also just shoot, chimp, and adjust if you like doing it that way. The advantage of using CLS in this manner is not only to have full manual control of flash output, but also using CLS you can set the remote outputs at camera position instead of having to walk around to each strobe to make a change. It is because of this latter convenience that I often use CLS signalling as the trigger, but set remote outputs manually. Note that in this usage, the remotes are actually set as REMOTE, not MANUAL.
If you set the remotes to MANUAL, then you set the appropriate output directly on the remote flash unit itself, and you are not using CLS to send signals to the remote to inform it of its proper output. In this mode (MANUAL), the remote will NOT respond to the preflashes from CLS, nor will it fire in response to an optical signal. Therefore, you would trigger it using a sync cord connected to "something," where something could be a radio trigger (like a PocketWizard), an optical slave (like a Wien) which receives the optical flash from your on-camera strobe and then generates the proper sync signal for the remote to which is it connected, or by placing the remote into SU4 mode, in which case you are enabling its internal optical trigger instead of using an external one like the Wien.
Note that as reported above, the SB600 DOES NOT have SU4 mode, so you need to buy an external optical trigger in that case.
"I guess my question is can I have the flashes in Manual and still have them fire optically from the built in speedlight on the D80."
--Yes, but with the approach described above. You can trigger the SB600 this way IF you attach an external optical trigger; you can trigger the SB800, SB900 this way using the built in SU4 mode. I assume the new SB910 also supports SU4. I don't know about the SB700 as I don't have one (I only have SB800s).
"Now that would be different that having the D80 set to commander mode right? because that would then be CLS. ( given the SB's are in SU-4 mode remote)"
-- Yes, if you set the D80 to commander mode, then you would fire the remotes in REMOTE mode - remember you can still use commander mode on the D80 to MANUALLY set the REMOTE outputs, if you want. Again, in this usage, COMMANDER mode is getting you the ability to set remote outputs at camera instead of walking around.
The hard part here is triggering the remotes to fire so that you can meter with your Sekonic light meter. Usually in a multilight setup, the approach is to turn each light on individually, fire it, meter the output and adjust until the output matches your desired exposure. The hard part is individually triggering the SB units remotely for metering. I personally now use the PocketWizard Control TL system, but that means a lot more expense.
Hope this helps a bit. Visit my Nikonians gallery.
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