Of course, you could just buy the unnamed, expensive radio triggers, and they really are worth the $400 or so if you need super reliability and other kinda groovy features, but those kind of folks will not read this anyway! I had given up on my pair of Cactus triggers. I had debated giving them away and just sticking with optical triggering (using the light of a flash to set off another flash wirelessly), but everything changed the past couple days. Here is what happened.

The problem with my Cactus radio triggers (aka “radio slaves”) was pretty simple: I would press the shutter release, and the flash would not fire. I press the test button on the Cactus, and nothing would happen. At first, they were just unreliable, which in time became utterly useless. Just a quick search on Flickr, and you will find loads of folks who love these and hate them (for these same reasons), so I figured I just had a dud pair.

So, I thought it was my battery. I changed that, and they were better for a while, but quickly went downhill again. That was when I discovered how reliable my optical flash triggering was.

I could use the pop-up flash on my camera to trigger my flash just about anywhere (around corners, through bodies, etc), at least, anywhere I had been using my radio wireless triggers. I still did not want the pop-up flash light in my photo, so most often, I deflected almost all the light with folded up paper or maybe just softened it with a coffee filter slid over the flash (high-tech, huh?).

There are two big negatives to this method of wireless flash, though. One, you are usually holding a piece of paper in front of the pop-up flash or holding a coffee filter on. That means you are shooting with one hand and sometimes at awkward angles. I did have the presence of mind to tape the coffee filter on a few times, but even still, it was a common problem.

And two (the really big downside), I am limited by the recycle rate on my pop-up flash. My “big” speedlight/flash can fire very quickly and many times in a row, but that little pop-up hangs after one or two shots and needs to recycle or recharge. And when you are doing a shoot with people (portraits, family, group, etc), and you see that perfect opportunity a half second after you  just fired…well, you miss it if you have to wait on that pop-up flash.

Having an optically triggered flash is still a great idea, but when that is a pop-up doing the triggering, you are greatly limited. If you had two or more speedlights, the “triggerer” either itself radio triggered or mounted on the camera, and the second flash triggered optically, you would be set. And that is where I am headed, but the pop-up flash just about killed my family shoot (see the last entry), and I had to find something different.

Re-enter: the Cactus triggers.

I took the Cactus trigger set and my flash down to buy batteries and test them out to make sure that was the problem. Oh, I have a little confession to make: as I was messing around with the idea of putting them back into action, I noticed the transmitter light was dim…i.e. it had a battery in it too and it was going dead. I should have known it had a battery too, but it just never registered in my head. I had figured it was using the camera’s power. I should have realized it had a battery because you can trigger it even when it is not attached to the camera. Not too quick on that one.

Anyway, turns out my brand new receiver battery was dead, because I had left it to “on” the last time I used it…at least, I assume that is why it is dead with almost no use, even though it was not receiving anything…unless that transmitter button is getting pressed accidentally in the bag…hmm. I digress, but an important digression for your information’s sake, don’t you think?

Lesson 1: turn them off when finished and possibly keep that test button from accidental “testing”.

Anyway, I replaced the dead receiver and the dying transmitter batteries, and the triggers (no-so-miraculously) worked flawlessly. One more thing, though: when I put the dying transmitter battery back in, it would still trigger the flash, but if I pressed it fast, several times in a row, it would miss a few of the clicks. With two fresh batteries, it would trigger the flash as fast as I could click the little test button. BINGO!

Lesson 2: if your Cactus triggers are not firing 100%, try fresh batteries in both transmitter and receiver.

So, once I realized it was just an issue of dead batteries, I bought some spares and put them to a field test. I am referring to the shoot I set up to fix the horrible flop of a shoot a couple days earlier. Flop shoot = pop-up flash triggered. Looking back at the photos from the second shoot, they never missed a beat; there was the flash in every photo, even when firing three or four quick shots when the family was in action.

So, for all those times I have hinted on this blog that my little Cactus radio triggers were less than wonderful, I take it back. That was probably the best $40 I  have ever spent on camera gear. If you are interested, just run over to Midwest Photo Exchange (where the cool, off-camera flash kind of folk go) and search for “cactus”. And do yourself a favor: pay $15 more for a V4 set, instead of the V2s set, which I have. You may not know it, but there are several very practical, little updates that make them much more useful in the field.

Come on, stop dreaming about $1,500 cameras and ungodly-expensive lenses, and drop $50 to make just about any flash (even that stol borrowed one from your dad’s camera bag) transform your photos from plane-jane to rockin’-awesome.