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MarmiK
January 24th, 2011, 01:40 PM
At an event last week, I used a Canon XS camera set a 1/100, F5.6, ISO 200. On occasional strips, one of the 4 pics would be very dark. (the live view would show that the pic just taken was dark, so one of the printed pics was dark) I can’t figure out why this was happening. Any ideas?
PhotoJames
January 24th, 2011, 03:03 PM
I use a mono light for my booth and didn't have any problems until I started running it as an open air booth. Seems one guest would want to take a picture of the guests in the booth. They would take a picture right before the booth did, this would fire the strobe and I would get a dark frame. I fixed this by covering the sensor on the mono light, no more dark frames.

Just a thought.
TaylorAdair
January 29th, 2011, 03:09 AM
We have had the same problem. In our case, it was the roving pro wedding photographers who were the issue. We have now moved away from the Rebels and use only hardwired flash connections.
PhotoJames
January 29th, 2011, 05:25 AM
Taylor are you using a hard wired mono light or a flash with an off camera adapter? With most mono lights their is some kind of optical sensor which needs to be disconnected or covered. With a flash, unless you're using some kind of AC adapter you have to replace the batteries. Not my idea of a lot of fun during an event. Just curious.
TaylorAdair
January 29th, 2011, 07:05 AM
We now use a hardwired (PC cord) mono light. Its optical sensor is automatically disabled when a cord is plugged into it.
MarmiK
February 12th, 2011, 01:59 PM
PhotoJames and Taylor: Thanks for the insights. I’m fairly new to the photo booth biz... What do you mean by a hard wired mono light or a flash with an off camera adapter?

I’m thinking of using a SL-150 studio strobe, would this avoid the dark photos? Thank you in advance.
apples
February 15th, 2011, 09:59 PM
I got some dark photos in testing a few weeks ago, even though I thought I had hacked the hotshoe (using Rebel, 1000D).
After much thought process and experimentation I discovered that the studio light was actually being fired remotely despite the hotshoe fix and the pc connection (weird!). To get around this problem I covered the camera flash with silver paper - result, the hot shoe fix works and never a dark photo.