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Archive 2014 · A fix for Canon flashes

  
 
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · A fix for Canon flashes


Hi,

I was shooting a friend's band the other night. He was playing in a dim restaurant, so I brought along four Canon flashes as well as my 6D camera. I put a 580EXII in the camera hotshoe as a master controller and placed another 580EXII and two 430EXII flashes on their little flash feet in safe places near the microphones. I bounced the slave lights using homemade foam reflectors made from Chuck Gardner's patterns (thanks again, Chuck; they work great! http://super.nova.org/DPR/DIY01).

The camera batteries were freshly charged, and each 580EXII Custom Function Number 5 was set to Zero, which should make ETTL the priority mode.

By default, the master flash was in the A group; I set the slaves to the B group. Using Canon's ETTL system, I began shooting, and at first I got good results, easily controlling the power of the slave flashes from the master flash and adjusting the output ratio between the master and slaves.

But halfway through the session, I realized that the slaves were no longer firing. I looked at the master flash and was surprised to see that it was now in TTL mode, not ETTL. I tried to move it back to ETTL using the Mode button, but that wouldn't work. I also tried to return to the wireless menu by pressing and holding the zoom button, but that menu would appear and then disappear.

I figured there was something wrong with the flash on my camera, so I set it aside and mounted my second 580EXII in the hotshoe, switching it to the master mode. It worked well for a while, but before too long, it also switched to the TTL mode.

I was able to use the on-camera flash by itself, but the results were not as good as with the multi-flash setup.

Eventually, for reasons I can't explain, the second flash returned to ETTL and I was able to continue shooting with he slaves. But I was frustrated that this happened with no explanation and no obvious fixes. I checked online but couldn't find users who had solved the problem.

So I contacted Canon USA support, and in a short time I received an answer. The solution was simply to clean the camera's hotshoe contacts! I did that gently, rubbing them lightly with a pencil eraser and then a clean cloth. In testing the setup, I have been unable to reproduce the problem, so it's a good bet that corrosion or oxidation on those contacts was interfering with the communication between the camera and the flash.

If this ever happens to you, remove the flash from the camera and gently clean the contacts. It may solve the problem!



Dec 02, 2014 at 10:57 AM





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