Night Focus with Pentax *ist DS with bounce flash gun

Hi, I'm having the problem with night focus with Pentax *ist DS with
external bouncing flash gun. I bough two flashes for pentax from ebay,
the first one is miti-dedicated TTL AF from Alfon, the second one is
Achiever bounce flash TTL AF,
both of them work fine, however when it dark I can not focus anything
on auto focus mode. The infared light never came out.

For built in flash when it dark and auto mode the flash will pop up and
spray light from the flash for auto focus two or three times until it
got focus.

Can anyone help!!
By the way I don't have money to buy the recommend flash form Pentax it
way way to much money. : (

Please help,
Jimmy H.

 

How can you tell? Infrared light is not visible without some
form of imager or detector. And it is (or should be) blocked from your
imaging sensor to avoid surprises.

But I really don't know the *ist. I know that the Nikon D70 has
a visible light flood from a source to the right of the pentaprism as
"autofocus assist", and if the SB-800 flash is mounted, it sends out a
more powerful flood of red light to reach farther. (not *infra*red in
this case).

However -- my real reason for replying to this is to ask you to
please not use the ">><<" (or any example of those characters) in your
"From: " header. I had to edit the raw article file in my news spool
(luckily, I'm the news admin, so I *can* do that), before my newsreader
would save it. It took the last '>>' as a command to append it to a
pre-existing file named "", which did not exist, so it
failed.

Weird characters in the "From: " can create problems, given the
large number of various newsreaders out there -- what is OK on one is
not on another.

Thank You and Good Luck,
DoN.

 

Focus manually. Problem solved. Jeez!!! Think!

 

The *ist DS doesn't have an infrared light. The built-in flash will try
to put some light out there for AF, but it's all visible.

That's what it's supposed to do.

Don't expect the lens to auto-focus at night without using the flash. It
needs light.

What are you photographing at night that can use a bounce flash?