Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I just received my Einstein yesterday. I previously have been and still am working with canon speedlights. I have a Radiopopper trigger system and I have never had any problems with them. I have been doing some test shots with my new E640 and vagabond mini and from what I can tell I am getting inconsistent shots or I really don't know what I am doing. Here is an example. I took a test shot of an object at 1/30 sec at f11 at 400iso. From the histogram this was a good exposure. Not too bright and not too dark. I then adjust the aperture to f13. Nothing else was changed. The picture comes out almost completely black. The strobe settings are on 1/16. I even played around with the different powers on the strobe and I saw the same problems. It was unreal what I had to do to properly expose the shot. I had to bump the iso up to like 3000. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of lighting with my speedlights and was pretty certain that the technical aspect of lighting between strobes and speedlights were the same. Am I missing something? I've got a pretty big commercial gig in Miami next week and was wanting to use the new strobe but I can't with these inconsistencies. Maybe my camera settings are off?

So right after typing this I had a bright idea. Turn off the ratio on my ST-E2. Bam, I am in business. There's my dumb moment of the day.

That could be part of your problem, though I would be surprised if that alone is the issue.

Anytime you use speedlites in TTL or wireless mode, there will be a preflash before the actual image is taken. If the light is set to trigger via the optical slave, the light will fire from the preflash. If given time to recycle (this will depend on preflash timing and power level settings) it will fire again during the exposure.

If not given enough time to recycle, the image may come out darker than expected, or even black. This will also mess with the preflash metering of the TTL lights, as the output of the E640 will contribute to what the camera thinks is a known output.

In short, we do not recommend TTL flash mixed with manual flash. The speedlites can be used wirelessly if set in manual, as long as you are not using the slave eye on the Einstein. Incidentally, the slave eye icon is the two arrows that point down and to the left. This should say OFF, and you should use a radio remote or sync cord.

Sounds like you were using the PX.

These are studio strobes...run your camera in manual mode...