sekonic L308S light meter help

[Nomadr]

hi Just a quickie, i am helping a friend to take some studio type shots tonight at a ballroom, i am taking along my 308s but unsure if i can just trigger her lights by the flashmeter alone ? (i normally use a cord and the 308 has a setting for either cord or non cord for the flashmeter, cheers martyn

[Nomadr]

panic over, i did some research on the net and it seems you use that function then trigger the flash manually, cheers martyn

[jiro]

congrats, Martyn. Your perseverance paid off.

[Colin Southern]

Hi Martyn,

You can't "trigger the lights" per sec unless you use the PC cable, but the lights can "trigger" the L308s.

Just remember that you may need to use manual exposure mode to drop your shutter speed dropping too low, if your friend is normally an Av shooter.

[Nomadr]

hey thanks , just got back, sorry Colin i meant the lights to trigger the flashermeter, basically you press the meter and it will wait for a flash before giving a reading,
anyway it all went pete tong, the meter said F9 @200 sec, iso 100, set the olympus up and the picture was virtually black, i was stumped, i got her to reset the camera but still the same,
the flashheads were those starter kits but they seemed powerful enough, she was triggering them from the popup flash on the Oly (i think it was a 620e),
it went from bad to worse, i had my camera and a remote trigger but the connector was too big to go into the back of the flash, so that was a no no,
by now people were queuing up to have their photos taken , as a last resort i lowered the shutter speed ,widened the aperture and got a half acceptable result,
i have never had this problem with my own equipment and felt really under pressure (you know how your mind just goes blank sometimes), in hindsight maybe the onboard flash was set to red eye and fired a pre flash which maybe also triggered the main flashheads ?
if that was the case i would have thought resetting the camera would have reverted the flash to front sync,
any ideas ? cheers martyn

[Colin Southern]

in hindsight maybe the onboard flash was set to red eye and fired a pre flash which maybe also triggered the main flashheads ?

Yep - that one get's 'em every time, unfortunately

(or more specifically, something was causing a pre-flash).

[Dave Humphries]

or more specifically, something was causing a pre-flash

Could be AF - some cameras strobe the main (on camera flash) as an AF assist lamp (in dim conditions). As a brand; Sony, and possibly (I think), some consumer Canons may do this. It should be possible to manually stop it, but then you risk badly focused pictures

I have a bright LED AF assist lamp, no idea whether that might cause a false trigger.

[Nomadr]

thanks for the replies, i just heard back that red eye reduction was not on so now i am tending to go with daves theory about af assist, i noticed later on in the night that the flash pulsed rather than just omit one flash,
next problem is she is as blind as a bat so maybe without af assist she is stuck, she also has another flash besides the pop up so next thing is to see if that pulses,
with more hindsight i could have used my camera with my sb800 to trigger the flashes, you live and learn,lol, cheers martyn

[Colin Southern]

thanks for the replies, i just heard back that red eye reduction was not on so now i am tending to go with daves theory about af assist, i noticed later on in the night that the flash pulsed rather than just omit one flash,
next problem is she is as blind as a bat so maybe without af assist she is stuck, she also has another flash besides the pop up so next thing is to see if that pulses,
with more hindsight i could have used my camera with my sb800 to trigger the flashes, you live and learn,lol, cheers martyn

Hard to know,

On-camera "pulsing" is fairly characteristic on an AF assist, whereas a brief and barely detectable single additional pulse before the main flash is characteristic of ETTL pre-flash.

Best thing is to always test the setup before "going live"

[Nomadr]

thanks ,i am going to talk her through everything over the phone, she has taken pics before with the set up and used a strobe (is that the correct word for a speedlight ?) on camera to trigger the lights, having seen some of the pictures it looks like its just the strobe doing the whole job, i thought it was down to the cheapness of the lights but now i know different,
i feel really bad because the pictures arent very good,while some of the dance shots i took with my camera are pretty nice, cheers martyn