I had a similar mystery once with my old ebay triggers. I was shooting
a group of about 75 people from a balcony above them at a wedding
reception. I got everyone posed, babies quieted down, everyone looking
up and smiling, eyes open and then... none of the four studio flashes I
had so carefully setup and tested only hours before would fire. Let me
tell you, it doesn't take many seconds to start sweating with 75 people
staring at you when they're just standing around staring up at you and
wishing they were eating lunch instead.
It probably took me 60 seconds from their perspective and 60 hours from
my perspective to figure out that the problem was a PC cord stuck into
the side of the transmitter but not attached to the camera. Despite the
fact that the transmitter was in the hot shoe, when the mini-plug on the
PC cord is stuck into the transmitter's PC port it causes the hot shoe
contact on the transmitter to be disabled... an undocumented "feature".
For reasons I don't recall I had tested the setup with the PC cord as
the trigger rather than relying on the hot shoe contact as I normally
did. But by the time for the actual shoot I had pulled the PC cord out
of the camera, possibly by accident. I don't really recall. Anyhow all
was OK again if I just replugged the PC cord at both ends or removed it
altogether.
I have since abandoned use of the cheap ebay transmitters since I've had
other and sometimes exasperating problems with reliability. I even
bought a different set of a different type. Still not completely
reliable. Now I have some Alien Bee transmitters which have much
greater range and work 100% of the time. But even they have a little
quirk that makes me nervous. The receivers have no off switch. They
shut themselves off after one hour if they're not activated by receiving
a transmission. But they also have a little green, slowly flashing
diode that indicates they're powered on and waiting. It bothers me
greatly to put them away in their little storage bag while that little
light is flashing. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
On 10/17/2010 9:22 AM, Ken Norton wrote:
> Well, another portrait session yesterday. Thought I had everything
> ironed out with the DMC-L1 so I had that all rearing to go. Pretested
> all the wireless flash and all was happy.
>
> Got to the location for the outdoor shoot and the flashes refused to
> fire. Looking back on it, I probably had the hot shoe transmitter
> mismounted. Regardless, I couldn't figure it out and fix it in 30
> seconds so I switched over to the E-1 which worked fine.
>
> Out of camera files? Perfect. Thank you Kodak.
>
> AG
>
>
--
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