Wein peanut/Vivitar283 and 10D with on-camera flash

[eduardphoto]

I try to use the on camera flash on Canon 10D to trigger a

Vivitar283 with a Wein peanut.

 

I see the 283 flashing, but it seems it's firing too late, since my

pictures seem to be lit just by the on-camera flash.

 

I even tried to photograph the flash itself, and it shows clearly it

is off.

 

I assumme the E-TTL preflash causes this trouble. Can please anyone

confirm?

 

Also, is there any work-around this? By my knowledge, there is no

way I can turn off the E-TTL preflash on the 10D...

[bill c.]

*************I assumme the E-TTL preflash causes this trouble. Can please anyone confirm?***********************************

 

Yep, that's what's happening.

 

 

***************Also, is there any work-around this? By my knowledge, there is no way I can turn off the E-TTL preflash on the 10D...

****************************************************

 

There's no way to turn off the pre-flash I'm aware of. There are some custom slaves out there that are made to combat this problem, check out www.bhphotovideo.com. You can TRY covering up the slave sensor with fabric or neutral density material until the pre-flash doesn't trigger it but the main flash does, but if you move the camera position an inch from your test position it might stop working. Or you could get a radio slave and trigger it from the hot shoe. Or you could trigger the flash using a PC cord.

 

What I do is get a non-dedicated flash and put it in the hot shoe, then turn off the built-in flash. You have to set the exposure manually, but since you're shooting digitally you can check your results immediately. A Vivitar 285 works well for this.-BC-

[skipd]

You could get a Wein Digital Peanut slave. That will trigger the secondary flash on the second burst from the on-camera flash.

 

HOWEVER, it probably won't do you any good if you are using the on-camera flash in an automatic mode. The reason is simple - the camera is communicating with the on-camera flash to control exposure, and cannot communicate with your slave flash. If you can go to a fully manual flash mode (for the on-camera flash), you might make it work OK. In manual mode, there might not be the pre-flash. In that case the standard Peanut would work fine too.

 

My suggestion for the best results - and the best control of your lighting - would be to ignore the on-camera flash in the first place and get an adapter to trigger off-camera flash units only (a cable connected from the adapter to the flash unit). Then you could have other off-camera flash units slaved off the first. Manual exposure control would be called for, but then you'd have the control you need.

[jim_leonard]

While it is annoying and not a good long term solution, you may be able to use flash exposure lock (FEL) to your benefit. That triggers the preflash when you press the exposure lock button and I believe that so long as you shoot the picture within some short delay (16 seconds?) it won't fire the preflash when you trip the shutter button.