Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I have several issues seemingly randomly with my alien bees during the course of a 4 hour shoot. Most commonly on occasion the strobes dont fire via the shutter(camera is a Pentax k10d) but do fire via the test button on my wireless sender. There were some posts addressing a similar problem concerning the over-tightening of the hot-shoe lock-nut, but I havent found this to be the case..it just randomly goes away. Yesterday, however, one or more of the bees(not the one w/the receiver pugged in) continued to fire 3x or more with the camera set on single frame. AND in addition I have a few frames that are mis-synced...ie half frame exposure..seemingly unrelated to the mult firing issue. I use the camera on Manual usually with shutter at or below 1/180(sync for this camera) Any ideas..?

what are you using for a wireless trigger?
I'd suspect that first if you're using the el cheap cactus fleabay stuff...symptoms sound familiar... ;-)

Very well could be the remotes overall quality. Also, you say "usually" you have your camera at those settings. What do you have set when not at those settings? if you exceed the x-sync on a Pentax, my understanding is the flash will not fire (unless it is a dedicated flash). Have you tried new batteries on the transmitter? Is it radio or IR? If IR, then it will suffer the same as any other line of sight triggering, in that it works great, as long as the slave eye can see it (if you can't see the slave eye, don't bet it can see the optical signal).

If you still have (presumably) black frames from the misfires, what does the EXIF data say?