STROBE does'nt work properly

[Simplewaves]

HELPPPP! I have a Neewer strobe and it works fine. My trigger broke so I'm using my built in flash to send light and the strobe set to slave so it flashes when it see's the light of the camera's flash. it works fine. But sometimes the camera does'nt catch the light of the strobe but I see it go off. Same settings, another picture and it works fine. Can anyone please help?

[Ads]

[o hey tyler]

What are your camera and flash settings?

[trabaker]

Make sure you're not shooting faster than your camera's sync speed.

[Simplewaves]

The sync speed is 1/250 and I'm shooting 1/125 sec at f7.1 iso 100. I shoot with the same settings and 1 time itcomes out ok and the other time not. My flash setting is slave( pref) i don't even know what this is. Theres PREF and there NOR. What is the difrence?

[Big Mike]

I'd guess that the problem is that your built-in flash is using a pre-flash (most do). It uses a pre-flash to determine how much power it needs for the actual photo. It happens very fast, very shortly before the actual exposure...that you probably don't even notice it.

But your strobe does notice it...and the pre-flash will trigger the strobe before the shutter is open. So when your built-in flash fires again (for the exposure), the strobe can't fire again so quickly so you end up with little or no light from it, showing up in the photo.

For this to work, you would need to set your built-in flash to manual mode (not TTL), so that it doesn't use a pre-flash. Unfortunately, many cameras don't have that options.

Other options would be to get another wireless trigger or use a wire/cord from the camera to the strobe.

[Simplewaves]

Thanks Big Mike. Makes a lot of sense now!