After an evening of playing some more with my Cactus V1 Triggers, I came to realize a few things.

First, you get what you pay for.

Second, there might be a way to fix this.

I’ve been frustrated in the past and more so tonight, by the seemingly random discharge of the receiving units. This happens when there are at least 2 receivers in close proximity and both are turned on. It also happens when one or both of them is close to the transmitter. I haven’t really determined the exact conditions under which these discharges occur but it all seems to boil down to proximity.

Tonight I even made another mind-boggling discovery. It seems MY OWN BODY caused the receivers to fire and I certainly managed to replicate the conditions. Here’s how everything was roughly arranged.

I had placed the camera on the couch somewhere behind me and I’m almost positive it wasn’t affecting the receivers in any way since it wasn’t close enough for that to happen. At one point I moved towards the object I was photographing and both flashes fired on their own. I moved back a bit, then forward again and it happened again. Rinse and repeat. Every time I repeated this movement, both triggers fired. I tried doing this from a different position but they wouldn’t fire. Somehow, my body was causing this to happen.

Apart from this anomaly, I had a whole bunch of unwanted discharges. It is really disconcerting because I find myself blinded by a flash when I least expect it.

I thought I should try to change the channel that the system uses. Initially I had everything set to 1-2. I played around with the combinations and finally I arrived at 1-N as being the one with the least number of random firings.

I did get one more random discharge but for the most part it seemed this setting had “calmed” the Cactus triggers down. It might be different for other people or the problem might become more aggravated for me too, in the future. Either way, it seems that changing the channel might be a possible solution to this madness. Even though these triggers are sometimes driving me crazy, I feel much better when I think about how much they cost me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 12:17 am and is filed under Lighting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.