Hi there I need your help. I have acces to a studio and the owner use white lighting system. He has 4 light conected to a board. From the board you select your output light intensity. From is main light he has a cord that is conected to his Nikon SB28 flash. Now I have a Canon 7e with a 550 canon Flash. How should I use his setting with my camera? I need an adapter of some sort. Where can I find one? Pices? Please help. Thanks

-- Patrice Nguenti (lion30@yahoo.com), April 05, 2002

Answers

Canon EOS cameras have a hotshoe that is rated for a maximum of 6 volts for the sync trigger. Unless you know that the White Lightning flashes use 6 volts or less, do not hook them up to your camera directly. You can buy a Wien Safe-Sync that will attach to your hot shoe and it provides a standard PC type connector that can be used with the other lights. The Safe-Sync will reduce the trigger voltage to 6 volts & be completey safe for your camera. But there is no way, or need to use your 550EX with this.

You could also trigger the studio strobes with an optical slave. There is probably one built into the White Lightnings. You could use your built-in flash for this, but you would want to deflect the flash up with a card or something so that it would not mess up your lighting. Or the 550EX, swiveled backwards, to trip them, but the 550EX's pre-flash will need to be disabled with the its Custom Function #3 or else the studio lights will fire before the exposure.

-- Jim Strutz (j.strutz@gci.net), April 06, 2002.