Shooting underwater with Sony A6700

[Chris Ross]

10 hours ago, Nemrod said:

 

Thanks for the brain drain. It hurts my head thinking about it sometimes. Thing is, I have two A6400 cameras widely separated in serial number. And UWT sent me a replacement with newer software way back, I mean, it is a now nearly a 5 yo camera and the same with the UWT trigger. None of them worked, not a different camera nor trigger. Beats me :(.

 

I know one thing, this has put me off on (future) cameras that require an external $$$ trigger. At least with the A6400 I can sync off the built in flash which works perfectly, every time, all the time, just not super fast. And it eats my battery if I did not have a booster or onboard charging capability.

I can understand the frustration - so it never worked 100% then?  Did you change out the hotshoe cable connector - that is the piece that is a known trouble maker.

 

See this post by Pavel:

 

If you move away from Sony you at least escape this connector.  I really quite like my OM-1 using the mini flash as a trigger.

[gremlin]

Wow talk about thread creep....

I had the A6500 before the a6700 and used the internal flash, with the extra battery in the Nauticam housing that worked pretty well, but I Was always trigger curious as they don't pull the battery down and also recharge faster. One thing I really can't understand though is how the triggers can't work with any flash that would just work with a built in flash? I would get it for the strength, and I'm sure these folks know their stuff, but my EE Brain just thinks if you just emulated what the built in flash would've done and the built in flash can trip all the various strobes in their TTL modes why can't a trigger also do that? Oh well.... Maybe that's why I stopped doing EE stuff after I graduated...

[Chris Ross]

44 minutes ago, gremlin said:

Wow talk about thread creep....

I had the A6500 before the a6700 and used the internal flash, with the extra battery in the Nauticam housing that worked pretty well, but I Was always trigger curious as they don't pull the battery down and also recharge faster. One thing I really can't understand though is how the triggers can't work with any flash that would just work with a built in flash? I would get it for the strength, and I'm sure these folks know their stuff, but my EE Brain just thinks if you just emulated what the built in flash would've done and the built in flash can trip all the various strobes in their TTL modes why can't a trigger also do that? Oh well.... Maybe that's why I stopped doing EE stuff after I graduated...

having an LED match the flash is pretty basic for a a manual trigger, it's the TTL stuff that gets tricky, basically it's reverse engineering the cameras TTL signals and converting them to something the flash can understand - and of course each flash has a different way of doing things. 

[gremlin]

No I get that, I guess what I said wasn't clear, I don't understand why different strobe require the triggers to do different things for the TTL to work rather than the Trigger just doing exactly what the built in flash does when used in TTL mode which does trigger the flashes correctly in TTL. In other words why do I have to tell the trigger what strobe it's triggering when I don't do anything to tell a built in flash what strobe it's triggering and that works?

[Chris Ross]

3 hours ago, gremlin said:

No I get that, I guess what I said wasn't clear, I don't understand why different strobe require the triggers to do different things for the TTL to work rather than the Trigger just doing exactly what the built in flash does when used in TTL mode which does trigger the flashes correctly in TTL. In other words why do I have to tell the trigger what strobe it's triggering when I don't do anything to tell a built in flash what strobe it's triggering and that works?

Probably a question to ask Pavel I think, he explained something in a post a while back about the numner of TTL profiles available.   I suspect it has to do with timings and how the TTL commands are communicated.  see here:

 

 

 

[gremlin]

I mean I'm sure they're there for a reason and Pavel's a smart dude so I don't doubt they're needed but the engineer in me just can't figure out how the built in flashes have no need of knowing what strobe they're actuating.