AlienBees and Rebel XT

He is probably referring to the modelling lamp.

When the Alienbees fire, depending on the switch settings the modeling lamp will momentarily go out and will slowly come back up as the flash capacitors charge back up. By slowly I mean the flash takes 1 second or less to go from completely discharge to full charge so during that brief moment it would appear that the alienbees have turned off.

There is a switch on the back of the head that you can change to make the modelling lamp stay on all the time. I don't have my head in front of me at the moment so I can't tell you off the top of my head what switch it is. It might be labelled track or cycle, pretty sure it is one of those two, change the settings and you will find it.

I hadn't thought of someone thinking that might really be a problem. I fully understand what you're describing, as I use a set of 'Bees myself.

I'm hoping to hear from MD-129 to learn what his thoughts were about.

What I mean is when I want to take a picture with the Alien bee strobes with out the use of an external or plug in device, I simply turn my "flash exposure com", down to negative 2. When I take a shot at my model, the strobes work the same as they did as if I was using a PC cord or other device.


bolantej suggests that the lights will not output the same amount of light, that they will only do a pre-flash and the light from my camera flash is the only thing that will be seen in the picture. But this is not how it is, the images turn out just the same as if I used an external trigger.

After six light readings using camera flash, I still get a perfect f/8 @ 125.

Does this make sense?

Michael, you cannot properly trigger studio flash units with a Speedlite unless you do some special setup to the camera and the Speedlite.

You can NEVER properly trigger studio flash units with the built-in flash on your camera.

The camera and the Speedlite need to both be in fully manual exposure modes. This will prevent the Speedlite from emitting a pre-flash (which would trigger the studio lights at the wrong time). This setup also means that FEC (Flash Exposure Compensation) will not do anything for you, as you will be in fully manual exposure mode.

You will need to set your shutter speed to the max sync speed for the camera (or slower) and you will need to set the aperture to a setting appropriate for the amount of light emitted by all the flash units that go off. A handheld flash meter would be extremely useful for this purpose.

If you are thinking that the AlienBees units are not working right, I think you are probably just not understanding how they are designed to operate.

Thank you for the advice, but I do understand how this all works.

Your AB lights will fire before the shutter opens. The shutter is not open during the pre flash that is setting off your lights. Yes, It will meter correctly.