I want to use one of my 550EX's in manual mode with my PocketWizard, meaning I have to buy a hot shoe to PC adapter or have Paramount make me a custom cord with a mini-plug on one end and hot shoe on the other.

The hot shoes I have seen have a metal plate that takes up most of the shoe area, then a circular contact in the center, surrounded by some dead space. I'm a little concerned about the four rear flash contacts on this plate. Do you think this will be a problem?

Thanks as usual.

Paul

-- Paul Ferrara (paul@columbusoft.com), May 20, 2002

Answers

I'm not sure if it will be a problem or not. Actually nobody knows.

My experiments with several Canon Speedlites ended up with either of two results. 1) It works fine, 2) It fires once and then locks up. I tried several different Speedlites on several different cheap hotshoes. Some Speedlites worked but most didn't. Some of the same models did & some didn't. I don't know why.

You can try using tape on the hotshoe adapter that isolates anything but the main pin. That didn' help me, but others reported that it made their Speedlite work.

If your Speedlite locks up, either turn it off and then back on, or simply press the open flash button. Then you get one more shot before it locks up again.

Canon clearly didn't intend their Speedlites to be used this way, since they didn't include a PC connection on the flash. Too bad. They could be more useful if they were so equipped.

-- Jim Strutz (j.strutz@gci.net), May 20, 2002.

I took my flash to a camera store today that usually has this kind of stuff but they didn't have what I needed. There's one more local place I can try tomorrow. I hate to spend $40 on a custom one from Paramount only to find out it doesn't work. One more tidbit...I seem to recall trying to use this flash with a hot shoe type slave quite some time ago and the foot didn't want to slide in and I was afraid of forcing it.

Just FYI, one of my reasons for doing this is that I bought a G2 and it doesn't work too well with my ST-E2. Doesn't work at all, AAMOF, when both the camera and flash are set to manual.

Thanks for your insight. I'll reply again with my results.

Paul

-- Paul Ferrara (paul@columbusoft.com), May 20, 2002.

I have a G1 & it's even more limited & picky about flash. What I have done is used one Speedlite as an on camera trigger (or even a cheap autoflash on low manual setting) and the 550EX set on manual and mounted on an Ikelite Lite-Link. That's the one slave that will always work with Canon Speedlites.

And you're right about the Canon flash foot being too tight an most generic flash shoes. It seems that there is no standard thickness to the foot rails.

-- Jim Strutz (j.strutz@gci.net), May 21, 2002.

I thought I'd just tack this on here for anyone interested. I took my flash to a couple of local camera stores. One of the hot shoe adapters we tried would not take the Canon foot; too tight. So then the guy that was waiting on me brought out another employee who had rigged up a different hot shoe with a mini-plug on the other end specifically to work with the PocketWizard. Turns out that he's building these himself and sells them to the store which in turn marks them up and resells them to their customers. It worked great, but the bottom line was $90 and I passed on it.

I talked to Paramount and they have a Canon off camera shoe cord laying around and will test it with their hot shoe. So I ordered a custom cord from them ($36) and they said they won't build it if the foot from that cord doesn't fit in their hot shoe.

Watta pain, huh?

Paul

-- Paul Ferrara (paul@columbusoft.com), May 29, 2002.

Well, here's the definitive answer! Got my custom cord from Paramount today and it works like a champ. Hot shoe on one end and mini-plug on the other and about a foot of cord between them. Fits the 550EX foot just fine and when I hooked it up to my PocketWizard it fired every time. The cord cost $42 with shipping.

Paul

-- Paul Ferrara (paul@columbusoft.com), June 06, 2002.