I confirmed yesterday something that I'd suspected for a long time - Pocketwizard radio triggers are a very long way from being in any way at all impervious to the ingress of water. Or in other words, they really don't like getting wet. At all.
One gust of wind and my carefully arranged softbox setup teetered in slow-mo into the picturesque mirror glass wetness of Ullswater, taking one of my long-suffering Nikon SB800s and attached Pocketwizard Plus II with it.
The SB800 was fine, but the steady trickle of water from inside the PW's battery compartment didn't exactly inspire confidence. Sure enough, it was dead after I'd shaken the last of the water from its innards. I finished the rest of the shoot using the built-in flash on my D300 in commander mode to trigger my two SB800s, and as I write this I'm waiting for the arrival of a replacement Plus II.
It's my first gear breakage in a long time, so I'm not too upset. But it'd be nice if Pocketwizard could see fit to add the odd gasket or two to make their products a bit less fragile in damp environments. OK, I dropped it in a lake. But it was only under an inch or so of water for perhaps 10 seconds, and the flash to which it was attached got similarly wet and didn't miss a beat...
Postscript: the replacement turned up on time (thanks to Robert White for their usual reliable service). Oh, and the dunked PW, after a night spent drying out, seems to have returned to life. So it looks like I now have a spare...
Too bad PW haven't come out with the Nikon version of the new TTL transmitters..
Posted by: Luis | April 02, 2009 at 05:43 PM
yep - i heard the new ones are waterproof too.
Posted by: Colin | April 02, 2009 at 09:06 PM