Introduction

I’ve been shooting a lot of photos lately with my 12 year old Panasonic GH3 lately. It’s such a fun, light camera, but since I started using it again I haven’t been able to get the flash to fire. So, I decided to buy a new flash on black friday. I bought the Godox iT22 O TTL Mini Flash. What I had forgotten, though, was that the reason the flash didn’t work was because any time I turned off the electronic shutter, I received an error message beckoning me to Turn the Camera Off and Then On Again.

The Panasonic GH3 with flash

Essentially, the issue boiled down to the mechanical shutter being sticky. I was able to shoot with the electronic shutter, but to trigger the external flash I needed to shoot using the mechanical one. After about a half hour of researching and fuckin’ about with the camera, I got the mechanical shutter working and the external flash firing. Sadly the internal flash doesnt work but that’s fine, it’s why I got the external one anyway. I am writing this blog for my own knowledge to fix it if it happens again because I will inevitably forget how I fixed it in the first place.

Steps

Here was how I did it:

1. Settings > Pixel Refresh
2. Turn it To Burst Photo Mode
3. Take a shit ton of burst photos

Boom! It’s working again! And the mechanical shutter continues to work when I switch it back to single photo mode. I’m looking forward to taking this out and shooting with it!