"Photographs cannot be taken" with manual lens and wireless triggers with off-camera flash

Good evening,

The equipment combination I am trying to use is:

• Nikon D3400


• Tokina 100mm Pro-D 2.8 lens*


• Neewer NW860iin Speedlite**


• Neewer N1Tn wireless hotshoe transmitter**


• Neewer N1Rn wireless receiver**

*_{The Tokina lens has a manual aperture ring.}

**_{The Neewer flash and triggers are re-branded Godox i860 and wireless triggers.}

The camera is set to M with the wireless transmitter on the hotshoe of the camera and the speedlight on the wireless receiver.

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When I turn the equipment on, I receive an error message on my LCD screen reading:

Photographs cannot be taken with current settings. Change flash setting.

I have tried internal camera settings and messing with the receiver, transmitter and speedlight, but the message still shows up.

If I place the speedlight directly onto the hotshoe of the camera, I can fire the flash, but not via wireless triggering.

How can I resolve this issue to use the wireless triggering?

Answer

Based on experience with non-identical but similar hardware, I would suspect you have the controller set to TTL.
For a manual lens, you need to be in Manual mode on the controller, on all groups, whether they have a linked flash or not.

I would assume this is because the lens cannot be stopped down to measure the light, though it would be interesting to know why it can't just measure the light with what it can actually see.

For several reasons, I'd suggest setting unused groups to 'Off' anyway [the Mode button will cycle TTL, Manual, Off], which leaves you only ever needing to keep track of active groups.