Troubleshooting flash! Please send help.
Dec 25, 2021
Hi guys,
So the story is that I've bought an Olympus EM5 Mark ii in 2015 for dental photography / sneaky travel camera. Dental photography is controlled conditions (light, timing etc.) and typically things are shot at ISO 200 F2.8 (portraits) or 18 (in the mouth) with a ring flash and shutter speed about 1/125 (though I just randomly chose that).
I found that the camera was terrible at the time, because I was using a stock lens, so bought a macro lens (60mm F2.8), and then also realised I needed a fancy flash, and bought a Metz Mecablitz 15 MS-1 digital macro ring flash.
Up until, now I have spent about $2000 on gear over the years and have never been able to get the thing working reliably. This is very awkward, because there is a shutter noise when the camera goes off and I feel like patients can tell when I take a photo and it fails - sometimes I have to take six before I get a flash.
Things I have noticed:
I've gotten to the point now where maybe 65% of the time the flash will fire and I will get a nice photo, and always carry extra batteries and watch my capacitor light. I link the body to the flash via a physical sync cord, because I have not been able to work out how to get it communicating (via wifi/RF?), and this seems to work ok.
I put the on camera flip up flash on the hot shoe, with a clip to stop the flash affecting the photo - I think I got that idea from the ring flash instructions - is this what I am supposed to do? The ring flash will go off without the shoe flash attached.
I've found switching the flash and body on and off tends to help, especially after leaving the set up on for a few minutes. Also found (unsure if legit) that if I swap from manual to the other modes sometimes that helps.
I've noticed that sometimes when the flash doesn't fire consistently if we turn the light in the room off it works better. This has led me to suspect that maybe there is some metering/sampling thing happening inside the body of the camera that is neutering the flash.
I've noticed once I've started taking photos I tend to be able to take the rest of the set (8-10 photos), maybe 90% of the time.
I sometimes work in a dusty environment, and never remove the sync cord in this environment. However, I am worried the sync cord might be the issue - do you think swapping out sync cords is a reasonable next diagnostic step?
TLDR: What do I need to do to my Olympus EM5 Mark ii so that my sync-cord linked Metz Mecablitz 15 MS-1 flash will fire every time?
ANSWER:
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