Slaves, old flashes and bulbs etc

I'm new to this K10D camera and I love it until I want to go underground. I learnt cave photography the old fashioned way... you stick your camera on a tripod, set it to B lock the shutter open and then wander around in the dark letting off your flashes and this may mean in my case over 200 for one exposure. I can still do this but many years ago I became modern and started using a few slave units for smaller shots especially where it would be unsafe or impractable to move about in this manner (especially now that you can't find cavers that can stand dead still for half an hour). But now I'm faced with the problem that modern digitals produce more than one flash to produce an image making my prehistoric slaves useless. Slave units are important where one uses flash bulbs and although I could go out and purchase Firefly slaves I would rather just manually set the colour balance and focus and turn the first flash off.

Can the first flash be turned off (assuming there are only two)?

Surely if Pentax want to give you full control then you should be able to do this.

Apologies if this has already been answered but I would appreciate your help

How about using an Infra Red Trigger mounted into the hotshoe? These are great for studio flash (no cables to trip over) and might be useful for the purpose you have outlined.

Also, welcome to the forums!

Thanks mate...

What I'm trying to do is use my old slaves (I was given my K10D and could never afford one myself) and would rather spend money on lenses because most of my old stuff is pre KA! I have 1 spotmatic, 2 MXs and and a P50 that started playing up from new.

Do you not get the same problem with infrared or does it not transmit for the first flash? some cave photographers (and I assume above ground photographers) put unexposed slide ( or fully-exposed neg) film over the on camera flash to convert it to infrared.

whats the deal on these infrared triggers? do they need to be setup? what do they cost?

cheers,

pete

Interfit IR triggers are around £48 at Jessops and they just fire once, so should be ideal for the purpose.

If your slaves are not PTTL compatible, I don't think you'll have any issues with more than one flash being fired. But... you will need the main flash to be on the hotshoe as the trigger -- or connected with pc cable via an adapter on the hotshoe. As long as the flash on your hotshoe is not PTTL compatible, it will not know to fire more than once.
If your slaves are then configured to fire when a flash is detected, you should be good to go... just like the old days.

Pretend the pop up flash doesn't exist.
What would you do?
use another flash on the hotshoe (manual or auto, not p-ttl).
use your other flashes with slaves.

or buy slaves designed to ignore the preflash.

the on camera flash is for novices, not guys like you an' me.