ross attix Offline Upload & Sell: On
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I posted this here even though it might be better in the lighting forum. It is a Canon specific question, so here goes..
I am not crazy about ETTL when using flash remotely. There seem to always be issues I run into that take forever to resolve, instead of just walking over, changing a setting manually and continuing the shot. The issues usually involve not being able to figure out why the flash (600EX) is doing or not doing something.
Today for example, I was playing around with a set up I need to use next week to shoot a group of about 40 people indoors. I plan to use the 600 as the main, and one or two other speedlights to augment and fill. All speedlights were off camera, either on Pocket Wizard Plus III (the 600EX) or optical slave for the others. Everything was in manual mode.
This is what happened. After setting up the 600 on it's own stand, custom function set not to go to sleep, Manual mode, full power, zoom at minimum setting, diffusion panel deployed, I was getting consistent f8 at 400ISO, about 10-12 feet from camera. I played around a bit over an hour or so adding additional speedlights, and after I satisfied my questions, I wanted to recheck the 600 to see how much fall off I would get from side to side from just that light.
Nothing had moved, so I turned off the other lights, reset the aperture to f/8 and took a shot-very dark. WTF? So I grabbed the meter to check, and sure enough, it shows f/4.8. I walked over to see the flash display, and it still showed Manual mode 1/1 power, which is full. I rechecked the light reading, thinking maybe I didn't let it recycle fully, still getting f/4.8.
What happened to f8? I have no idea, so I cycle though the modes again, ETTL, etc., until I get to "M", I push the +/- button to highlight the scale, rotate the wheel to be sure it really is set at 1/1 (Full), recheck the reading, now it shows f/8. I have no idea what happened, or most importantly, how I prevent it from happening when I do this photo.
Any ideas?
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