Uh oh. What's wrong with my AF540 flashgun?

[Dubious Drewski]

So I'm in the middle of shooting (just practice, there's no model here today, thankfully!) When suddenly, my flashgun stops firing in optical wireless mode. It's been working fine all night up until now. I didn't change a thing, didn't touch it while it sat up on its tripod - it just stopped responding.

I then put fresh batteries in, I checked that I was still on channel 1 on both camera and flash, I have everything in full manual, gun on wireless slave mode. I moved it right up to my camera to factor out lost line-of-sight. I even mounted it on my camera again and it does still fire just fine, so the bulb's not toast.

Can anyone think of anything I might have forgotten to check?

[Asylum Steve]

Can anyone think of anything I might have forgotten to check?

Well, first I think we need you to clarify things a bit. I assume by flashgun you mean your flash unit (never heard the term "gun" applied to lighting before!).

Is this the same unit you show in your other post (the variable output one)?

Also, what exactly is your setup? You mention wireless optical mode, channels, and slave triggering. Firing your flash with a wirelss transmitter on a radio channel and using an optical slave trigger are two very different things. Are you trying to do both?

And what did you put the fresh batteries in to?

So, until I have a better picture of exactly how you're shooting, it's hard to figure out what might be wrong...

[Dubious Drewski]

I've heard flashgun a few times before. I liked it, so it stuck with me. ;) Yes, I'm referring to the flash unit that can be mounted onto a camera(Like I said I had tried). This is also what I put the fresh batteries into. This device is different than the studio strobe I was talking about in that other thread.

There is no radio-anything in my setup. It's all optical for this poor boy. (There are apparently 4 possible channels you can operate on when in optical mode, and I was just confirming that I was on ch1 the whole time.)

I thought the post was pretty succinct. Maybe I was wrong.