Canon 7D and Vivitar 285

I've doing real estate photography for a number of years now; primarily virtual tours. I've been using on camera flash at all times. Would like to take my business up a notch on my stills and plant flashes around the room, but have zero experience at doing this. I've got 4 Vivitar 285's hoping to make them all work with my Canon 7D. I've got one PocketWizard Plus X in my bag; but will need to get another I'm guessing. Can anyone give me some pointers so I don't have to go buy all new flashes. Thank you!

Yes, you'll need at least one more Plus X, and ideally another four. You want one as a transmitter on the camera hotshoe, and then one as a receiver on the flash.

You could add optical slaves to the non-radio-slaved Vivitars. But optical slaves require line of sight, and the 285s don't have rotating heads, which is probably why you got the Plus X.

Or you could go for much cheaper fleabay triggers like the Cactus V5 or the Yongnuo RF-603.

There are reasons a lot of us like the YN-560 and YN-560ii for this stuff: dumb optical slaves are built in, the heads rotate, you've got all the power levels from 1 to 1/128, and standard PC sync ports. Frankly, buying four YN-560ii flashes is still cheaper than getting four Plus Xs.