Cranky Firefly

[mrodoc]

Does anybody else have problems with their Fireflies? Mine will do an entire trip working perfectly then on the next fail to fire the gun at all. I spent an hour the other day checking it worked at home and as soon as we got underground the bloody thing did nothing. It's pretty new so it cannot be the batteries and that wouldn't explain why it works sometimes and not others. It's driving me nuts.

 

[dunc]

I've not had any real problems with mine (firefly 2) apart from when I placed the slave on the gun with the supplied velcro - having it away from the gun helped matters (usually dangling loose), something to do with interference.
Do you have a different flashgun to test it when underground?

 

[menacer]

Same happened to me the other day. I was told that batteries near the end of their life can appear ok when tested in a nice warm living room.
When taken underground however, they object, and give up, a bit like a car battery at winter.
Try changing the Firefly batteries a little more often.
This could be complete LOB of course but it seems a reasonable explanation

 

[mrodoc]

I am always suspicious about batteries as you mention and I may try changing them. The maker says they should last for a year or so but I think I will change them and see what happens. Several of my guns won't work with it but this one seems(ed) to until I was at the bottom of Dolphin Pot!

 

[mak]

Both myself and Ting Tong have had fireflys "fail" - in that the batteries have come loose within the case - now when I change them I make sure the silica is placed on the batteries to help hold them in place when putting the "box" back together.

 

[footleg]

I've not had a problem specifically with my fireflys, but sometimes my slaved flashes fail to work underground. It is difficult to determine the specific problem, but the following appear to be factors:
- Intermittent connections within the connecting leads (sometimes wiggling the lead gets it working again)
- Batteries running down in the flash (some of my flashes start to misbehave when their batteries start to run down)
- Bad contact between the slave connector and the flash connector

This last one needs further explaining for my gear. I have removed all the hotshoe connectors from my fireflys and fitted phono plugs to them. I've done the same for my non-firefly (Gibson kit) slaves. I have fitted phono sockets to all the leads for my flashes and to the hotshoe sockets I removed from the fireflys. So now I can fit any of my slaves onto any of my flashes. If one pair stop working I can swap the slave to see if that is the problem. It it still does not work I try the original slave on another flash. This usually allows me to work around the problem underground and still get some pictures.

I recently brought a radio slave from Hong Kong (via Ebay) to remove the need to have a masked flashgun on the camera. This works fine whenever I test it at home, but has failed to work on every underground trip I have tried it on! Could be very moisture sensitive, or possibly temperature sensitive. I've not done any environmental testing at home yet to try and work it out.

Footleg