Promaster 7500 edf help please!

[khoover213]

I got a promaster 7500 for Christmas and have been trying to figure out if it will remote trigger with my Canon 50D. It works fine on the hot shoe, but I would like to try out some off camera flash work. I have set the flash to slave mode and seem to understand that concept but cant seem to get my camera to accept it as the slave.

So I guess my question is, Does anyone use their flash off camera? and if so what setting should my camera be on it make that happen?

Thanks for any suggestions in advance!

 

[ChristopherCote]

So I guess my question is, Does anyone use their flash off camera? and if so what setting should my camera be on it make that happen?

Hello!

I just picked up this flash today as an inexpensive back-up and I was excited to see the slave feature. Canon flashes also have a slave function, but it works very differently than this unit...

Canon: Flashes use infrared beams of light to "talk" to each other and synchronize their firing. The good thing about this is that they can tranfer exposure information to each other and coordinate power levels, but you must use Canon lights to do all of this.

Promaster: The 7500 uses a photocell that senses bursts of light and will fire in conjunction with that burst. The bad part of this is that ANY burst will fire the Promaster in slave mode (including other people's cameras), but that's also what makes it great. It doesn't matter if you're firing your 50D, a point and shoot or a cardboard camera from Walgreens... it will work in any circumstance.

Now, here's the tricky part: figuring out what method to employ to fire the slave. The 50D has a flip-up flash and that will need to serve as the master (until you buy more flashes!) If you want the Promaster to serve as your key light (main source of illumination), then you'll need to manually reduce the power settings of the flip-up until it's only putting off enough light to fire the Promaster. If the 7500 is going to be used as rim lighting (or background lighting or whatever), then you can leave your flip-up flash in TTL and use it as the key light. I can only think of limited circumstances where this would be useful, but I've learned to never say "never" when it comes to this stuff! Read your instruction manual to determine when you need to set the 7500 to ignore the TTL preflash. I hope this helps!