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5D Studio strobe question


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Before anyone lectures me, I did do a search and could not find anything on this issue. If someone knows of a post discussing this, please feel free to share it.

 

I've been a professional photographer for over a decade, doing almost exclusively on-location (non-studio) work. I have a set of Elincrom strobes that I would use here or there, but which mostly just stayed in their travel case.

 

Recently, I opened up a studio location and am more actively marketing studio portrait work. I have been having a particular technical problem for a long time, and I just cannot figure it out. I have very logically and logistically troubleshot the issue, without success. I cannot find a pattern or situation which causes this problem.

 

The problem is that my off-camera strobes will not always fire.

1) This happens both with wired connection and with wireless connection.

2) This happens almost immediately during a session, not a long time into a session, which leads me to believe this is not an overheating issue.

3) I never have this problem with my on-camera Speedlite strobes, leading me to believe there is nothing wrong with my hotshoe connection.

4) If I point the camera at the subject, the strobes won't fire. If I point the camera at the floor (same settings) the strobes fire just fine.

5) It doesn't seem to matter what I try to spot-meter the focus on, the strobes will not fire.

6) If I turn the remote on and off again, it works sometimes but not always. This isn't an acceptable solution because I still get the same (ahem) performance issues in front of my client.

7) When I click the test flash button on the remote, it fires every time without fail. When I then raise the camera up to photograph the subject, the camera/strobes don't fire, instead choosing to actively stick their tongue out at me and say "Ha! Your client thinks you don't know what you're doing now. Good luck with your session, idiot!"

 

I have read through both the camera manual and the light manual, and cannot find anything that would lead me to believe that there is some sort of setting I have which is deliberately (almost seemingly maliciously) refusing to send a signal to the strobes to fire.

 

I'm shooting on manual mode. If I overcompensate by jacking up the ISO and stopping down the shutter, then the strobes will fire just to spite me and overexpose the image.

 

There seems to be no rhyme or reason, but ultimately I need these things to fire every time. I want to be at ISO 100 with a medium deep aperture (say, 6.3) but I also don't want those settings to determine whether or not the strobes fire. I want to be able to make adjustments to the aperture as needed without worrying that the strobes will "decide" they don't want to fire.

 

This has to be a setting issue somewhere in the camera. There must be a situation with the camera where you treat a studio session differently than an on-location session. I don't know why that would be the case, but maybe that's the problem.

 

ANY help or advice on this matter would be appreciated. I have lots of sessions coming up for the holidays, and I'm really nervous about the embarrassment this problem is creating.

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I've been shooting with Elinchrom and Canon cameras for around 20 years now. I don't have your specific model. However, I have never had the issue you're describing. I always shoot in manual. My strobes (and others that I have used) are old-style manual strobes.

 

Are your strobes ETTL/TTL? That might be an issue though. Because the pre-flash of one strobe can set of the other strobes and then you'll not catch that strobe in your photo.

 

Mine are pretty powerful, so 6.3 would not be an aperture I would be working in. So therefore I must also ask the very basic basic question: what is your shutterspeed?

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The problem is that my off-camera strobes will not always fire.

1) This happens both with wired connection and with wireless connection.

 

Hi, I don't have an immediate answer, but initially would suspect two different things. One is some oddball case related to a polarity mismatch between the camera and the flash. The other, because of the camera tilting issue, is a slight mismatch in the hotshoe connections such that pointing the camera down somehow causes the connection to change slightly.

 

That aside, here's how I would start troubleshooting. First, I'm not sure exactly what you're doing - multiple flash units or not, and how you are triggering for the tests. For example, when you "click the test flash button on the remote" I don't know if you mean on a radio remote control or on the physical flash unit itself, etc.

 

Since you have both wired and wireless (radio?) triggers, I'd go immediately to the wired system to rule out any radio issues. If you are using multiple flash units somehow wired together, disconnect that system such that you have a single wired system from camera to a single flash unit. Then determine if this works.

 

Regarding how many test flashes in a sequence, I don't know how often you have a failure; you'll need to test enough times for the possible failure to likely show up. Meaning that if it misfires one in 5 times, then doing sets of 10 test shots is probably enough.

 

So, I'd start with a single hard-wired sync from camera to a single flash unit. Preferably from a camera sync connector on the body (not a hot shoe adapter like "safe sync" adapter, etc.). But... first be sure that the flash sync voltage is NOT too high for the camera; you don't want to risk damaging the camera circuitry.

 

So, start out with a test sequence (10 test fires, for example) in some configuration. (Write down the results.) Since your camera seems to be sensitive to pointing the camera, try a set with camera pointed down as well as a set pointed normally.

 

If there is always a misfire issue, I'd try manually shorting out the sync wire at the camera end lime so: unplug the wire at the camera, and if it's a PC connector try the tip of a ball-point pen, such as a plastic-body Bic pen into the center of the connector on the wire (this always works, in my experience). If it doesn't, try something like the tip of a paper clip (hold the paper clip with an insulating material JUST IN CASE there is a high voltage at the connector). Anyway, the point of shorting out the connector is to determine whether or not the fault is in the cable.

 

There are multiple ways this troubleshooting sequence might go, but if you find, for example, that the camera fires the flash intermittently whereas the ball-point pen fires reliability, then I'd try reversing the polarity of the wire. This means to reverse one connector, if possible; otherwise cut the wire open and reconnect with the wires swapped.

 

Anyway, this is just a starting point; hopefully a pattern will emerge that you can narrow in on.

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3) I never have this problem with my on-camera Speedlite strobes, leading me to believe there is nothing wrong with my hotshoe connection.

 

Just a quick note: if your Elinchrom units have built-in photo slaves (this means the ability to fire when another flash is sensed), this could be an emergency backup system for you. You could use the hot shoe flash to trigger the Elinchrom units. To keep the hot shoe flash from significantly affecting the lighting you could set its power level very low, or perhaps point in a different direction, etc.

 

Ps, the hot shoe flash must be in a manual exposure mode - ETTL systems have it preflash to test exposure prior to the main flash. (Such a preflash can trigger the studio lights too early.)

Edited by Bill C
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Thank you both for answering my rather long original text. In answer to your questions:

1) Shutter speeds are variable and do not seem to solve the problem. It's always less than 1/200th, though. It's not one strobe messing up another (there are two units total). Neither of them are firing.

2) I apologize for the lack of clarity. By "remote" I mean the wireless transmitter attached to my hotshoe. I actually purchased this because the hard-wired version I was using was causing this problem. I thought the wireless transmitter would fix the issue, but obviously it has not.

 

When wired to the flashes rather than using the transmitter, I'm not using the hotshoe. So, the problem exists both when I hard wire through the side of the camera, and when I use the wireless transmitter.

 

It's really, really weird. I think I'm just going to have to see if this happens with different lights. If it does, I'll know it's something with the camera.

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Trying a different camera would have been one of my first troubleshooting steps. Using the wireless trigger with an older DSLR or even a film camera would determine if its your camera or some issue in the trigger/light setup. Since you are a professional photographer, I am surprised you not have a backup camera.
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That's very judgmental, Ken, and makes incorrect assumptions about my equipment and level of professionalism. I have four camera bodies. What I said was that I wanted to isolate it as a different problem first before I looked at the most expensive problem that it could be.

 

In case you're wondering about my level of professionalism, you are welcome to buy my book on the business of wedding photography and judge for yourself.

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Not trying to pick a fight, nor question your professionalism. In fact you do have many additional camera bodies as I would have anticipated. If the flash system works like a champ with your other camera bodies, you would have quickly isolated the issue to your main camera body. If you still have sync problems with other camera bodies, then its the flash system you can focus on.

 

If you check my 21+ year posting history on PN, I don't intentionally pick fights with anyone and perhaps I worded my previous response too hastily.

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Appreciated, thank you for the clarification. I've had too many bad experiences with online forums, to the point where I stopped engaging with them for quite a long time, because of people who were just nasty.

 

I will try your suggestion to further isolate the problem. I was trying less expensive fixes, looking at it more financially than logically, in terms of my order of troubleshooting operations.

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If you check my 21+ year posting history on PN, I don't intentionally pick fights with anyone and perhaps I worded my previous response too hastily.

 

FYI, you seem to have your history blocked - clicking your name brings up only "This member limits who may view their full profile."

 

I'm not gonna say too much about that back-and-forth except that Michael might have mentioned having another camera to test with, and that Ken didn't need to ponder "out loud" with respect to his presumptions related to "professionalism."

 

But back to troubleshooting, of which I've done a pretty fair amount. My understanding is that this situation exists when a radio slave is used (quoting from Michael's post #1):

 

4) If I point the camera at the subject, the strobes won't fire. If I point the camera at the floor (same settings) the strobes fire just fine.

...

7) When I click the test flash button on the remote, it fires every time without fail.

 

(Michael has said that the "button on the remote" means on the radio transmitter in the camera's hot shoe.)

 

Something I would do in this situation is to see if the transmitter has an indicator light to confirm transmission. If it does, one can observe this during the non-fire events. A failure of this indicator light would suggest that the camera is not supplying the sync signal. However, this is not necessarily conclusive for various reasons - perhaps the battery is marginal; perhaps the transmitter pins don't line up exactly right with the hot shoe contacts, etc.

 

At this point, I'd go to Ken's suggestion - swap the camera out to see if the problem is solved. If this fixes things I'd also try the wired connection. If this also works, great!

 

But I'm not done. There would still be the issue of the non-working camera. Where I come from we don't just sideline a camera without knowing what the issue is - we decide to either repair or not repair. I'd go thru like I said above - go to the wired system with a single flash unit; nothing else connected that might confuse the issue. If it continues to work pointed down, but not level (?) I'd try all orientations - point up, down, forward, upside down, vertical frame in both directions. Any failures, tape the sync cable to the camera body (so that the camera connector is not being flexed) and repeat the test. In the configurations that don't fire the flash try wiggling the sync connector during the process. (This might identify a broken internal wire at the sync connector, or something similar.)

 

Of course, it's possible that swapping out the camera still doesn't fix the problem. In that case... well, just say what the results are.

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I actually did say that I had another camera (yesterday 6:43pm), and that I was wanting to rule out anything else before having to rule out something as expensive as a camera body.

 

I eventually did test with another camera and was unable to replicate the issue. So it is definitely a problem with the camera body (sigh). Bill's suggestion early on ("...because of the camera tilting issue, is a slight mismatch in the hotshoe connections such that pointing the camera down somehow causes the connection to change slightly.") ended up successfully isolating the problem. Pointing the camera down was forcing the remote "forward" for lack of a better description. When I brought the camera back up, then manually pushed the remote forward on the body, it worked. Every time.

 

So, thank you everyone for the advice and potential solutions. In the end, it turns out that the hotshoe isn't holding the remote down closely enough to the sensors, no matter how tightly I screw it on. This wasn't a problem with the Speedlite, probably because it's much heavier and has something of a locking mechanism. I'll have to see if this is something I can fix myself, or if I have to send it in for repair.

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. In the end, it turns out that the hotshoe isn't holding the remote down closely enough to the sensors, no matter how tightly I screw it on.

 

Cool! As a temporary fix you might be able to loop a rubber band behind the radio transmitter pulling it forward.

 

It might be worth another look at the wired connection. It's now clear that this problem is not related to the radio unit's problem, so perhaps it is as simple as an intermittent broken wire in the cable. It's nice to have a fallback system if the radio unit ever goes on the fritz. (I'd make sure I could recognize symptoms of low batteries; sometimes they will slowly blink an indicator light.)

 

Best of luck with your studio lighting endeavors. (BTW, an incident meter that can read flash is a really useful tool for setting light ratios, etc.)

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In the end, it turns out that the hotshoe isn't holding the remote down closely enough to the sensors, no matter how tightly I screw it on. This wasn't a problem with the Speedlite, probably because it's much heavier and has something of a locking mechanism. I'll have to see if this is something I can fix myself, or if I have to send it in for repair.

 

It's possible that the hotshoe rails have been bent slightly upwards, maybe it got wrenched with a big speedlight on it? If so, you might be able to close them up a bit with gentle application of a small hammer. If the camera has any value, it's probably better to send it in though.

 

Also, check, if you can, that it's the camera and not the flash radio trigger that is out of spec. Maybe you could glue some very thin plastic to the top edges of the hotshoe foot, make it a snug fit and push the contacts down onto the camera?

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It's possible that the hotshoe rails have been bent slightly upwards, maybe it got wrenched with a big speedlight on it? If so, you might be able to close them up a bit with gentle application of a small hammer. If the camera has any value, it's probably better to send it in though.

 

Also, check, if you can, that it's the camera and not the flash radio trigger that is out of spec. Maybe you could glue some very thin plastic to the top edges of the hotshoe foot, make it a snug fit and push the contacts down onto the camera?

 

Since it happens on one camera and not another, I'd lean toward the possibility that it's the hotshoe rails on the camera. I shoot 50+ weddings a year and have been doing so with these camera bodies for several years now (Canon 5D Mark iii) so they definitely take abuse when I pull the cameras up and down quickly with heavy Speedlite flash units on them.

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It might be worth another look at the wired connection. It's now clear that this problem is not related to the radio unit's problem, so perhaps it is as simple as an intermittent broken wire in the cable. It's nice to have a fallback system if the radio unit ever goes on the fritz. (I'd make sure I could recognize symptoms of low batteries; sometimes they will slowly blink an indicator light.)

 

Oddly enough, I bought the radio transmitter because I was also having trouble with the wire doing the same thing and being inconsistent with its connection to the side of the camera body. So, my backup on this is to go with a Speedlite and use slave mode on the strobes. It's not ideal, but it works. I'll definitely order an additional radio transmitter as further backup, though.

 

Thanks, everyone!

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