A Word of Advice for those of you with Canon Equipment

First of all, a very Happy New Year to anyone who reads this. (No comments for a long time - it may just be me and myself.) I regret to say that my family situation did resolve itself over the holidays, and not in a happy way. But it is good that it is finished and life, as always, goes on.

Anyway, here's the advice, if it helps. Canon's newer DLSR's allow separate setting of second curtain sync for onboard flash and external flash. However, you have to have a new enough flash to allow this to work. Otherwise the flash's setting overrides the camera's. (Or the camera may not allow you to set external flash curtain sync at all.)

Here's the kicker.

Although it's not readily apparent from the manual, if your flash can be a master flash (has a setting for "Off/Master/Slave," typically on the 500 series of Canon flashes) you cannot set second curtain sync on the flash if you are in anything except "Off" mode.

This is actually quite logical in that with multiple flash units it would be problematic to ensure that you got the result you wanted, but it's not obvious. At least, it wasn't to me. I haven't checked to see if this is true for slave-only flashes (mainly the 400 series) but it very well may be.

Edit: It is in fact true, at least on the 430EX.

M More after the jump - click here!