How to fire strobes with a K100D/ hot shoe

[saint bubba]

I bought some studio strobes that can be fired through a PC connector..problem

is the k100d does not have a pc connector.

I bought the pentax 360fgz flash but it doesn't have a pc connector either.

The manual for the k100d says not to mount

anything on the hot shoe except the pentax flash since it could short out the

camera. The strobes I bought say they can be fired via infrared also just

wanted to know if anyone has done this setup with a k100d without blowing it

up.

 

thanks

Chris

[rick_gerbehy1]

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=3625&A=details&Q=&sku=245292&is=REG&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation

 

Wein safe synch hot shoe adaptor. It should work.

[mark u]

Try mounting your 360FGZ on the camera, setting it to the lowest available manual power setting and bouncing it off the ceiling. Hopefully that will be sufficient to trigger the IR detectors in your strobes. Do not attempt to use the flash in TTL mode, since that will produce a metering pre-flash that will trigger your strobes too early.

[Jochen_S]

Mark's idea sounds right. Although I own some 360 FGZ I'm reluctant to use it in the studio. It's pricy and jumping between PTTL to be used somewhere else and manual mode there might be too confusing for me one day.

 

I use some inexpensive slightly outdated SCA 300(0) flashes with adaptors for Pentax TTL flash film bodies to trigger my strobes via optical slave. A AF280T dialed down to lowest output and bounced away would do the same job, but especially the AF assist beam of the SCA 3000 series is nice to have. The older SCA 300 beam buggers me with needing it's own 4 AAA cells. A friend of mine who borrowed one half of my strobes kit uses some IR trigger, but it doesn't work perfect with our Mecalux slave cells and is compareably hard to test, so I really prefer the cheap hotshoe flashes which I see going off.

 

If your strobes are quite new you could maybe trigger them directly via PC hotshoe adapter. A reliable Voltmeter is $10 today and also quite useful to sort out defective NiMh cells. Anything below 10V measured between hotshoe pin and sides should be perfectly safe. If the flash manufacturer / importer still exists, they might be willing to tell you exact specs of your stuff. - My strobes have a trigger Voltage in the 100V+x range, so they would fry the DSLRs for sure.

 

Radioslave units are most probably in the safe Voltage range too. We had some trouble with covered optical slaves once in a while, but I had no reason to buy that extra luxury yet.

 

If you are rather paranoid about stray light from your trigger flash you could connect it via cable and hotshoe adapter to the camera and place it in a box together with the most inexpensive slave cell you can find and hook your strobes PC cord to that.

 

According to my experience PC plugs are a nuissance and by far not as reliable as desireable, so I try to avoid them. Tripping on the damn synch cord or pulling it out by accident also sucks, so I do quite well with hotshoe flashes as trigger. I keep a backup unit in reach and change batteries if necessary.