With respect, that's a pretty uninformative post - bordering on useless.
Why not?
I could see the electrical contact pattern having some problems with contacts hitting Nikon contacts where they aren't supposed to. That could be fixed by taping off the contacts, though. The main hotshoe contact still functions normally.
voltage. IIRC canon system is higher than nikons. might be wrong on that.
And there wasnt a mention in the OP the extra frankenstein stuff. If you tape off the contacts, yes, it will most likely trigger the flash but I dont know why you would want to do that. Better to buy a 20 dollar radio trigger off ebay and fire it that way.
I have use many of my Canon flashes 1) Micro ring light 2) 420 EX 3) 580 EX II, on all of my Nikons. They don't automatically like eTTL but if you set them to manual mode the Nikons will fire them. I use them to take close up pictures of flowers. So I normally set them up to manual mode.
Not really useful as you get manual only unless it's a 580EX II (Which has Auto mode), Spending $50 on an old SB-24 will get you a far more capable flash than any Canon flash for non-E-TTL use.
If you do try this, I'd recommend taping the 4 smaller contacts on the flash to prevent any possible electronics issues.
BenV wrote:
why would you want a Canon flash when Nikons system is much better?
Of course, that doesn't answer the question or have any bearing on it whatsoever
I couldn't research it at the time but I was recently at a wedding where the guy I was with had a nice 420EX but his camera was having issues - would have been nice to be able to toss it on my D300 since I was using the on-board flash at the time.
There are lots of reasons to do this, not the least of which is "because you can."
In RE: the voltage comment, doesn't the ISO specification for the hotshoe specify a voltage range? Otherwise you'd be in danger of frying every camera with a hotshoe - Canon and Nikon flashes work fine on cameras with standard hotshoes. Why not on each others'? Besides the potential issue of the contacts, I mean.
For example the Pocketwizard slaves work fine on both Nikon and Canon cameras and there's not a specific version for each. I shoot Nikon but was doing portraits the other night and one of the guests not only wanted to use his own camera to take a shot, he wanted to borrow my flash trigger as well. It was some sort of EOS Rebel, but after giving him a quick lesson in how to set ISO, aperture and shutter speed he was able to take the shot fine.
It was pretty funny actually, when I rattled off the manual settings for him for my Profoto strobes, he looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language (Australian maybe )
