Need a little help with strobe timing with shutter

[fire5man]

Good Day to all,

I am having a little trouble syncing my camera to a strobe that I have on loan from a friend for this upcoming weekend dive trip. The camera is an Olympus Stylus 1010. The strobe is a sealife ReefMaster external strobe. I guess it fires off an optical light sensor built in to the strobe. Anyways all the test photos that I have been taking are very dark. This makes me think that the reefmaster strobe is firing out of sync. Anyways can anyone give me a hand on how to solve this issue.

Thanks

 

[bvanant]

My guess is that the olympus is putting out a series of preflashes and the strobe is firing on the first preflash and not when the shutter is open. I don't remember is the 1010 is capable of not firing the preflash or not if so you should disable it.
Bill

 

[bmchugh]

Inside SeaLife strobe is a switch that lets you cancel pre-flashes. Try adjusting it and test the camera and strobe until you get the strobe to fire on the correct number of pre-flashes.

 

[herman]

Sounds like a mismatch between the camera preflash and the strobe like bvanant suggest. Try shooting a photo at a mirror, if the preflash is set correctly you should see the strobe in midfire in the photo. You will either need to stop the camera from preflashing or correctly set the stobe to match the camera's preflash, if you can do neither you are out of luck with your camera/strobe combo.