Have I fried my 580 EX ii?

Flyinggina

Over the last two days I have shot roughly 500 pictures using my Canon 580 EX ii with the Lastolight Easybox hotshoe and a 430 with an umbrella. I was suing the STE2 to control the flashes. The ratio was set 8:1 in favor of the 580.

This afternoon, the 580 didn't fire about 20% of the time, even with a change of batteries. (I was working the second of two portrait shoots today.)

I am using lithium batteries.

When the batteries were taken out of the speedlite, they were very hot.

It is possible that I wasn't giving the speedlite enough turnaround time. We had music playing in the bg so I couldn't hear it. But I had no problems with it during a shoot yesterday and I was not pushing any more today than I was yesterday.

One more fact.

This morning, I think I triggered the flash accidentally (I was shooting on the floor) - maybe hit the test button on the side of the 40D. I thought I heard a zap. It was after that that things began to act wonky.

Any thoughts?

Virginia

pathfinder

Flyinggina wrote:

Over the last two days I have shot roughly 500 pictures using my Canon 580 EX ii with the Lastolight Easybox hotshoe and a 430 with an umbrella. I was suing the STE2 to control the flashes. The ratio was set 8:1 in favor of the 580.

This afternoon, the 580 didn't fire about 20% of the time, even with a change of batteries. (I was working the second of two portrait shoots today.)

I am using lithium batteries.

When the batteries were taken out of the speedlite, they were very hot.

It is possible that I wasn't giving the speedlite enough turnaround time. We had music playing in the bg so I couldn't hear it. But I had no problems with it during a shoot yesterday and I was not pushing any more today than I was yesterday.

One more fact.

This morning, I think I triggered the flash accidentally (I was shooting on the floor) - maybe hit the test button on the side of the 40D. I thought I heard a zap. It was after that that things began to act wonky.

Any thoughts?

Virginia

Hi Virginia,

Canon has two specific warnings in the manual for the 580EXII about overheating when shooting in Storobscopic ( page 25)or when using the modeling flash ( page 44). I seem to remember other warnings about over heating with the 580ex and the 430ex as well. Shooting with your 580EXII inside a soft box might increase these risks due to the added lack of cooling air flow. Letting the 580exII cool overnight should solve the issue if no permanent damage was done.

Lithium batteries tend to get hot when discharged, or charged, rapidly. I doubt they get hot enough to damage the flash normally, but.....

Are you sure the difficulty with the 580exII firing was not due to the limited sight lines between the ST-E2 and the soft box. I find I have to turn the flash body around sometimes when using a soft box to get reliable triggering, even indoors.

If you really fried your flash, it just would not fire at all, I suspect.

jeffreaux2

Te first thing Id try is to see if it will fire when mounted directly in the shoe. Munt it on your camera with fres batteries and see what happens......let us know!

Flyinggina

Thank you both very, very much for the helpful replies.

Jim, the speedlite bracket on the Lastolite soft box leaves the entire speedlite outside the box so I don't think ventilation is the problem.

I have to think on the line of sight possibility. I was on the floor almost directly under the soft box so that could have been a factor.

I think I did trigger the "modeling light" thingie on the 40D accidentally when I was on the floor. Whatever I did, the flash was very unhappy!

Jeff - I am off to try the speedlite on camera. Also, I will try to figure out what happened at the time I heard the zap.

I shall report back.

Again, thanks guys.

Virginia

digismile

And don't forget about the battery in the ST-E2. I thought my flash was not working properly shortly after buying my ST-E2 and it turns out the original in the box battery that came with the ST-E2 didn't last very long. My replacement has seemed to have lasted a very long time.

Just another thought.

BenA2

Embarrassingly, I have burned out a 430EX with the modeling strobe feature, and I don't think that's your problem.

It happened because the way I was holding the camera I kept bumping the DOF preview button, which triggered the strobe. I didn't think anything of it at the time. Later, though, when I went to change the power on the flash, I couldn't press the buttons. Upon closer inspection, I found that the whole control panel had melted and ended up fusing the buttons to the cover. Man, it really must of gotten hot. I did manage (using somewhat exesive force) to pop all the buttons free except the center button.

Funny thing is, though, other than not being able to change the power setting, the flash works fine now. It fires normally and all the other features work. So, I don't think that's your problem.

By the way, I saw the same melting, but to a lesser extent, on the 580EX II I was also shooting with. But it still seems fine. It was only after all this that I found the warning in the manual to limit the use of the strobe. Since this incident, I've disabled the modeling strobe in the custom functions of the speedlites.