Paul C Buff and A7Rii

[goat]

I shoot with the A7Rii and decided to venture into the world of studio lighting. After some research I decided to try and go with the Paul C.Buff Einsteins and went ahead and got a starter kit that includes the cyber commander and transceivers.

 

After playing familiarizing myself with the devices I noticed that the flashes were firing at full power when the commander was shoe mounted to the Sony regardless of the settings set on each Einstein. I know that the commander is not 100% compatible with the Multi interface shoe and that I would not be able to achieve HSS, TTL, etc but this problem seemed odd to me. Is there a setting I was missing - wrong flash mode set either on the camera or lighting?

 

When I fire a test from the commander it shoots at the power level assigned, it is only when i take the picture and the camera is telling the commander to fire that the full power is defaulted.

 

On another note I just decided to remove the commander and set the Einsteins yo slave then use a BOLT flash I had previously owned that included its own transmitter as the trigger and the entire set up worked flawlessly. I enjoyed having the commander and my i phone remote controlling both the lights and the camera. - the bolt was bouncing off the ceiling and lighting my backdrop.