550ex question <-- will it trigger a 420ex/550ex

[abel]

hey guys, i just ordered a 550ex after borrowing a friends for a couple of days. man that thing was awesome so i had to get one of my own along with a off camera cord.

my question is can the 550ex mounted to my camera trigger off a slave 550ex or 420ex by itself or will i need some kind of other gadget or gizmo...

thanks guys.

[CanonUser]

Yes, definitely...The on camera unit can be a firing or non-firing master. The off camera is a slave and the master/slave can be adjusted either way. Check out the shots of the models on the runway. They were shot with 2 550EX as described above.
http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=4175628&amp;a=31254972&amp;f=

Regards,
Alan

[robertwgross]

hey guys, i just ordered a 550ex after borrowing a friends for a couple of days. man that thing was awesome so i had to get one of my own along with a off camera cord.

my question is can the 550ex mounted to my camera trigger off a slave 550ex or 420ex by itself or will i need some kind of other gadget or gizmo...

thanks guys.

I'm reading your words closely, and I think the answer is NO.

A 550EX, as a slave, can trigger from a 550EX master, but it cannot trigger from a 550EX slave, and it cannot trigger from a 420EX slave. All of this assumes that you intend to use the Canon wireless flash system.

A 550EX can act as a dedicated flash on the hot shoe (wireless OFF), or as a wireless master, or as a wireless slave.

There are other ways to trigger it using optical slavery, but then you will be outside of the Canon wireless flash system, and you won't ge doing ETTL, and gadgets and gizmos are required. There are some here who do this.

---Bob Gross---

[DaveG]

hey guys, i just ordered a 550ex after borrowing a friends for a couple of days. man that thing was awesome so i had to get one of my own along with a off camera cord.

my question is can the 550ex mounted to my camera trigger off a slave 550ex or 420ex by itself or will i need some kind of other gadget or gizmo...

thanks guys.

You would use the 550 as the Master and another 550 or a 420 as the Slave. You set the slave to Group B, and the 550 will default to group A. (By the way: find that ANYWHERE in the 550/420 or 10D instruction books!) Then you select the Master position for the 550 and the Slave for the 420. You go throught the menus until you find a way of enabling ratios. Then you can set up a 1:3 - or whatever - ratio.

Make sure that you have the face of the 420 pointed back at the 550's position. It may require that you rotate the flash head to make this happen. I you don't do this the 420 may not "see" the instructions from the 550, and not fire.

The 420 puts out this very bright and at times very annoying red pulse. I like it most of the time since it tells me that the 420 is turned on and ready to go. But I have had people at events tell me how bothersome it is with this red light flashing on and off. You don't want to let this light hit the subject by the way. If it's a speaker at a podium the light will use the speaker as a screen, project lines onto them and both the subject and the audience will be completely annoyed!

I've got soft Velcro on both sides of my 420's and I bring along some small black cardboard cards with the hard side of the Vecro stuck on them. I use these cards to flag the off-camera flash to prevent flare. One card goes on the side of the flash closest to the camera, but often I'll add a second one one to the other side of the flash, if I want a directional snoot of sorts. It's been very effective when I've photographed a subject at a podium and there's a PowerPoint presentation on a screen to one side of them (which is in my background). My snoot keeps any flash light
from hitting the screen. This preserves the PowerPoint information as a interesting background and prevents spill light from my 420 from hitting the highly reflective screen and potentially blowing out the exposure.

[robertwgross]

my question is can the 550ex mounted to my camera trigger off a slave 550ex or 420ex by itself or will i need some kind of other gadget or gizmo...


You might want to clarify your question and use of "trigger off". Are you asking:

(1) Can the 550EX (mounted on the camera) act to trigger a slave 550EX or 420EX?

(2) Can the 550EX (mounted on the camera) trigger from a slave 550EX or 420EX?

---Bob Gross---

[abel]

sorry about that...

my question was

could a 550ex on the camera send a signal to a slave flash (420 or 550) and tell it to fire as well.

bob, i think i was asking #1... hehe.

[robertwgross]

Right.

At my first reading of your question, I was thinking #2, not #1.

Yes, the 550EX can be mounted on the camera and switched for Master of the Canon wireless flash system. It has controls for channel number and so forth, and it will "talk to" whatever slave flash units are there, like 550EX or 420EX.

I have another gadget, which you may or may not need. The STE2 transmitter will sit on the camera and act like the Master. Then I place my 550EX a few feet to the left and my 420EX a few feet to the right, and they are both selected as slaves. The STE2 transmitter does the Master wireless control, but it isn't a full flash unit.

---Bob Gross---