Lights, strobes, and lighting technique

Anybody have an answer to this? I have a OLY C5050 in a PT-015 housing with Matthias Heinrich TTL gizmo.I am using two SB 105 strobes, one TTL and one slave. Exposure is great when I use only the TTL but when I use the TTL and slave I get only black. Any ideas?

zulu00

That's odd. You'd think that at least ONE flash would be firing correctly - the TTL cord-connected one. The other flash will not be a TTL slave, just a slave. The SB105 will fire as a slave, but only at whatever power you set it at.

Sorry I couldn't help.

James

My guess: When the camera activate the TTL strobe first time for the pre-flash, the slave strobe is activated and add its light to the total amount that the camera measure, since the camera get a lot of light in the pre mode its activate the TTL strobe at the 'real' time for very short time. the second slave works not as TTL so its uses a lot of is power in the pre flash and not recharged in time for the 'real' time.

As I said, its only a guess.

I agree with Alto. I have Sea&Sea strobes but had the same problem. The optically slaved strobe was fully discharging on the pre-flash and fooling the TTL into thinking that there was loads of light available. My slave strobe then did not recover fully or quickly enough for the second discharge. Because of the false TTL reading the hardwired strobe hardly discharges. My slave strobe did not have a pre-flash setting so I now use a Y-sync cable. Everything works fine now. I am not sure but I think Matthias or Mikedive does an additional gizmo that allows two strobes to be used rather than a y-cable.

Thanks guys for the responses. I think I found the problem, I replaced the battery in the TTL gizmo. Tested in a darkened room and everything went well. The slave operated in every position, Full, 1/4 and 1/16 and the exposures are right on the money. The battery is supposed to be good for about 50 hours, I must have been playing around more than I thought. The batteries are cheap enough, so I will keep a supply on hand.

highly suprised that this could work. as James stated SB-105 is not able to adjust power to the mother strobe (optical trigger only, not TTL). The SB-105 has only manual power optical slave mode. No Slave TTL. Maybe the slaved SB-105 had the right power adjusted (manual setting!) by accident.

In addition the SB-105 is not fast enough to drive pre and mainflash properly with certain cameras/configurations. I've tried a lot before I sold my two SB-105. But you might get away with certain (slow strobing) cameras.

regards,

Julian

If you are going to do lots of testing .....

50 batteries for $18 dollars. Stores charge $3 or more each. Ok absurd, but .... search the net for 1225 battery prices.

http://www.batteryspace.com/index.asp?Page...WPROD&ProdID=27