I've run into this twice and it's irritating as heck.
When shooting in radio mode, the recycle time for ALL flashes drops to the recycle time of the SLOWEST flash. ie. the flash with the lowest battery power.
I generally run 2 X 600ex's on light stands...one on-camera...and one on a short light stand for backlighting when I need to.
At a recent wedding, I didn't realize that the batteries in one of the flashes were low (the flash I had just setup to backlight the couple during the first dance).
Before linking in the low-battery flash my recycle time for the 3 X 600ex's was less than a second (manual at low power). After I linked in the "backlight" flash, my recycle time dropped to 8-10 SECONDS. This is an eternity when you have a short amount of time to get some key shots.
The most irritating part is that NONE of the flashes would fire until the low-battery flash had recycled and synched via radio.
I had to walk over and power-off the low-battery flash in order to get some decent first dance shots (I didn't have time to change the batteries while the couple was dancing).
The second time this happened, one of the flashes on the 2 light stands slowed down (due to low batteries). I had to physically check ALL flashes to find the one with the low battery power and replace the batteries.
Be aware of this condition if you are going the 600ex route. This issue does not occur when using PW's, RP's, Cyber Syncs, or other triggers - all flashes recycle independently and do not wait untill all flashes have sync'd.
asparkes wrote:
GR mode is your friend. Just toggle the flash off in menu option 1 so long as the flashes are all assigned their own group,
Ahh....that's what I was missing. Was using all in the same group...need to play with separate flash groups a little more to get comfortable with this. More reading and playing coming up!
I've found that using the flashes with the radio system will add 0.5-1 second to the recycle time. To see this use one slave 600EX-RT and one master (ST-E3-RT or 600EX-RT). Fire a test flash at full power and notice how the pilot lamp on the slave flash will turn on 0.5 - 1 second faster than on the master. Since "flash not ready" is detected in a split second by the master there can't be any good reason for the delay. I haven't found a way to work around this and hope for a firmware update...
Will need to have a closer look through the manual.