Are my strobes working?

[Dubious Drewski]

Hey all. I just bought the Opus M1002 lighting kit. I've got the m100SR strobes set up and working as slaves, but there's something strange going on. I press my shutter, my camera's onboard flash goes off (It's a K10D), and the strobes fire. I can clearly see it all happening properly. BUT no light from my strobes is getting into the photograph (only that tiny bit of my camera's onbard light). The strobe's timing is off, obviously. Through playing around, I found out how to make it work. I set my shutter to trip after a 2-second delay. This causes my camera to emit a preflash, and this somehow makes the strobes fire on time and show up nicely in the photos. It doesn't work with the 12-second delay or no-delay, only 2-second.

Is this normal? Is this how I have to do it?

(This kit came with zero instructions, which I think is a terrible, inexcusable thing)

[WsW-WYATT-EARP]

What shutter speed are you shooting at. I learned early with mine - I was shooting at 1/500 sec. that my strobes wouldn't always since with the camera. Need to shoot a slower shutter speed. Around 1/125. I was getting about 8 out of 10 shots that would sync, not saying I was getting full use out of my strobes, just might of been catching enough light to make the shot.

[Dubious Drewski]

I was shooting at 1/20. Hehe. I think I figured it out...maybe. It turns out it's not my internal flash that sets of the strobes on time, it's my Pentax 540 external, because it can fire manually.

So get this, I have to set my internal as the master, which sets off the external (which I guess I'll have to use as a fill for all of my shots), which then in turn sets off the strobes on time. Crazy eh?

[OmahaAdam]

A good fix, if possible, would be to use a sync cable to get it right every time.

[Asylum Steve]

A good fix, if possible, would be to use a sync cable to get it right every time.

Slaving external flashes to an internal camera one is (as you've found out) tricky business.

It's usually better not to use your camera flash when you're using external strobes, especially if the only reason is to trigger them.

Much better to sync one of the externals to the camera, then slave the other one off of that...