foefam said:
I'm starting my first forays into studio lighting. After getting my last
roll of film developed I noticed that some of the flash shots had a
black bar down the left hand side. Some of the photos were taken with a
T32 mounted in the shoe, and some were taken with a sync cord attached
to an Alien Bees monolight. With the latter setup I had the T32 on a
slave to overexpose a white wall behind the subject. Shutter speeds were
all 1/60.
The black bar showed up only in the sync cord shots; the T32's all came
out fine. I'm chalking it up to one of two things:
1) Flash sync at 1/60 only works with OEM flashes (T32, T20, etc.) and
other brands and/or PC sync requires 1/30.
2) User error. It's possible that the PC sync/Alien Bees setup, I left
the camera set to auto instead of manual. The OTF sensor may have sensed
a properly exposed photo, especially with the T32 on the white
background, and closed the shutter earlier than 1/60.
I'm leaning towards solution 2. I'll be conducting some more tests this
weekend, with the camera set to both manual and auto. If anyone on the
list has any other suggestions or links to websites dealing with OM
flash, I'd love to hear them. The OM-2s manual isn't too helpful on this
topic.
I wonder if the same problem might occur if you are using the auto
setting with a non-Olympus T-series flash?
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I also have OM-2s', T-32's and Alien Bees. But thinking back I realized
that I have never used the Alien Bees with film. They have only ever
been used with the Minolta A1 which provides pretty high sync speed. I
typically use 1/250 as the sync speed with the Bees via PC connection or
radio transmitter off the hot shoe and have never had a sync problem.
Whatever your problem is with the 2s/Bee setup I don't think it is any
delay on the part of the Bee in responding to the flash signal. Even
with the radio transmitter involved it syncs perfectly at 1/250 and I
suspect it will go even faster than that. It should have absolutely no
problem with 1/60th.
Although I have never yet used the Bees in conjuction with the film
cameras I would never attempt to set the camera in auto mode with a
flash connected to the PC socket. There is always the possibility that
the camera will decide that the ambient light is sufficient and choose a
shutter speed a little bit faster than 1/60th or just fast enough to put
a black bar in your frame. Even when I was using T-32's in a studio
arrangement I would place the T-32's and OM-2s in manual mode.
Chuck Norcutt
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