Greetings / Occassional BLACK Images

[TaylorAdair]

Greetings all. I am new to the photobooth business and have run into a couple of problems which I am hoping you may have already solved. I'll try to spread them out by topic and not display all of my ignorance at one time!

I've done about a half dozen events so far and generally things are going pretty well. I'm using a Canon Rebel XS, combination of tungsten floods and studio strobes, UP-DR200, Stealth Switch, and a Dell laptop. Using live mode and triggering the strobes with an off-camera and off-stage Speedlite (yes, a Kluge). Same configuration as best I can tell for all events.

But, at the last event, three images out of about 800 came out black. Not "flash didn't fire" black. And not "all zeros" black. Kind of "digital noise" black with RGB values ranging from 0 to 4.

Sound familiar to anyone? Causes? Solutions?

Thanks,

Taylor

[PhotoJames]

It sounds to me like it might be a mechanical issue. How old is your camera? Might be worth it to have it serviced, especially if it's seen a lot of use. Other than that you might have a cable going bad somewhere. It could be a recycle issue on the flash that you are using to trigger your strobe. Since you have a "Kluge" as you call it, there are a lot of possible things that can go wrong. If it is only 3 out of 800 it's going to be even tougher to figure out because it isn't happening that often. Do you have a back up of all the parts? If so swap out one thing at a time and shoot a whole event to see if the problem goes away. Good luck.

[TaylorAdair]

Thanks, PhotoJames. I bought the camera new for the photo booth. It has less than 7k actuations. That said, I am also suspicious that it could be the culprit.

I've realized that there was one thing that was different about the last event: I put a USB extension on the StealthSwitch and, probably as a result, saw some 'extra' triggering of the booth. Chalked it up to large groups moving in and out of the booth but maybe it was a flaky connection. I wonder what effect StealthSwitch actuations have in the middle of a sequence. Something to test.

[inabooth]

How many times has the shutter released on the camera, sounds like the shutter is going bad.

[TaylorAdair]

I bought the camera new for the photo booth. It has less than 7k actuations.

[TaylorAdair]

Problem resolved: So. If the speedlite that is being used to trigger the main flash becomes (somehow...) set to "slave", it can cause these random black images. It's probably more surprising that it worked at all in this configuration....

:o

[tienkan]

Hi! I also encounter the same problem of having occasional black images.

My current set-up is Canon Powershot G7, a softbox, and a wired trigger. Once in a while, I occasionally encountering an all black image. What do you think might be the problem? My pictures are taken at least 6 seconds per image so I don't think the recycling time of the flash is the problem.

Thanks!

[jasonnaylor]

a wired trigger

Check your hotshoe, check your wire, and your plugs. Then check again.

I had this problem for weeks/months and couldn't figure it out. Turned out to be 1) a bad hotshoe connection and 2) a snapped wire. would work sometimes when the connection was good, other times it wouldn't. It drove me crazy because I had both problems, but once identified it made sense and I simply replaced both of them and problem gone.

Check your cables.