It’s no secret that getting your flash off the top of your camera is the quickest way to improve your photography. Flash Zebra is a great, little (as in one-man-band) company that sells a wide range of solutions for getting some distance between your camera and your flash.

I originally found Flash Zebra when I was looking for a way to tie a Elinchrom Skyport (which I love) to my legion of Canon 580Ex strobes. Fortunately for me the $19 wired hot shoe on Flash Zebra was a heck of a lot cheaper that upgrading to the Canon 580EX II. If you’re a fan of Pocket Wizards, you’ll find that Flash Zebra can tie your PW to virtually any device. They also sell the handy PW caddy and many other cool items.

Beyond a great range of solutions, you’ll find that Flash Zebra has great prices. At first, I was put off by the difference in prices between Flash Zebra and larger sites. My first order put my concerns at ease. My items were shipped immediately. Upon arrival I found their quality to be top notch. Through several orders, I’m now able to tie my Skyports to everything from speedlights to monolights to studio packs.

As flashmasters Joe McNally and David Hobby have proven again and again, the first step to getting an amazing photo with your strobe is to uncouple it from your camera and move it to the side/back/top/bottom of your subject. Combine a unique flash angle with TTL flash control and you have a dynamic duo.

TTL (Through-The-Lens) metering of flash is one of the amazing windfalls of digital photography. Not only can your DSLR figure out where to focus and what shutter/aperture combo to use, it can tell your flash when to fire and for how long. Wireless TTL works by sending a series of pre-flash light pulses from the controlling unit atop the camera to the remote unit(s). Both Nikon’s i-TTL and Canon’s E-TTL provide wireless solutions that enable the camera to maintain control of the strobe(s) if… if there’s nothing between the camera and the strobe, if the strobe is not too far from the camera, if there’s not too much sunlight, if it’s not raining, if… Enter RadioPopper, destroyer of the IFs.

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If Joe McNally were a cartoon character, I think he’d be the Tasmanian Devil (although I’m sure that some days ol’ Joe feels like he’s Wile E. Coyote). Why the Tasmanian Devil? He never slows down. Between shooting, blogging and teaching, Joe’s the photographic equivalent of a whirling dervish. Fortunately for the legions that follow in his dust trail, Joe has also been carving out time to write his next book The Hot Shoe Diaries - Creative Applications of Small Flashes.

Good news. You can pre-order it now on Amazon. For those who waited to order Joe’s first book, The Moment It Clicks, and could not get it until the second printing, you know that you’ll want to pre-order your copy of The Hot Shoe Diaries. So, do it now. We’ll wait for you to come back. If all goes as planned in the McNally household and at New Riders Press, you’ll have it in hand by Christmas.

And for the four of you who have been reading PixSylated for a while, the answer to your other question is “Yes”. I’ll pimp The Hot Shoe Diaries just like its big brother. Click here if you’d like to get a close look at Joe’s first book and read my original post on ‘Pimping Your McNally’.

For frequent McNally installments and more details on The Hot Shoe Diaries, keep an eye on Joe’s blog.

[And thanks to The Man himself for giving this cub reporter the go ahead to run with the story before he made the big announcement.]