I just returned from shooting a bat mitzvah ceremony and dance. I was able to put into practice some lessons learned from last week's shoot of a school play.
The dance was in a dim hotel ballroom, and I used a Super program filled with Portra NC 400 color print film and fitted with my tilt/swivel flash unit, a Quantaray QTB 9500A with a Pentax module. This is, or was, Ritz's top-of-the-line TTL unit for manual-focus SLRs. About three-quarters through the dance, the flash symbol stopped appearing in the Super Program's window, and despite all my tinkering I couldn't get the camera to recognize the flash. I've had problems like this before with this flash. For what it's worth, I couldn't get the flash to even fire when off-camera, either. I tried spare batteries and a spare module. Nothing seems to work now. Maybe I didn't note carefully the AA orientation; it appeared that all four cells should go with the positive "button" upward. When the flash symbol doesn't appear in the Super Program, what is usually the cause--low battery voltage? A bad contact in the module? A poor fit to the camera? Another problem: I know I set the flash's ISO to 400. But when I packed everything up, the ISO dial was set to 800. Could this be because I briefly used a slip-on polyethylene diffuser? Could the diffuser have tugged the ISO button to a different setting when I wiggled it on or off? I plan to follow the recent advice not to push-process. But I took a good 45 shots after the diffuser came off, and just hope they don't end up underexposed. Paul Franklin Stregevsky - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
