Hola Mis Amigos,

I finally relented and purchased an external strobe. I've really enjoyed dragging a little camera around with me the last 5 years but I've never been much of a serious UW photographer. I rarely go to manual mode, I usually shoot jpeg instead of raw, and I routinely clip the camera off to my left chest D-ring and forget about it for long periods of time while I cover lots of ground and enjoy the dive. Despite me not taking photography seriously, I've managed to get a bunch of decent shots to share with friends and family (fortunately, most of these people have never seen the work of Elaine, Chris G, Chris M, Roger, or Jim so they think my pictures are great).

The peer pressure for better photos (thanks a lot guys) finally overcame my aversion to spending lots of money on a small plastic thing and I broke down and purchased an Inon D2000 with ULCS arms and base. It's mounted to a Fuji E900 with Ike housing and 105 WA lens. The new rig is much bigger feeling (Elaine is laughing at me right now!) and it was weird having to swim it around instead of clipping it off and forgetting about it. I

I only have 1 week before leaving for Belize so I took it out for a few test dives last weekend. I left the camera in auto mode, forced the flash to trigger the strobe, and tried to learn a few things about where to point the strobe. I figured that I would work on manual mode after the trip and focus on the basics of strobe pointing for now. This strobe stuff isn't as simple as it looks :-) I'm still not sure when I can get away with close focus wide angle or when I need to remove the WA lens. I found that lighting the nudi with a single strobe was tough with the WA lens attached because the nudi was almost touching the lens. I was pleasantly surprised at how moving the strobe far away from the camera got rid of most of the backscatter. Another new thing for me was being able to light a big scene. I could never do that with the internal strobe.

Anyway, here are a few pics of my first efforts. Any advice from the seasoned strobe users is appreciated.

Cheers,
Ross-O

• First pics with new strobe

• Well, you could use a second one Roger 21:53:22 05/01/07 (3)
  • Re: Well, you could use a second one Ross-O 23:49:38 05/01/07 (2)
    • another money sink Chris 09:38:52 05/02/07 (0)
    • AD holder / lens caddy Roger 07:42:10 05/02/07 (0)
• great job Ross scottfiji 08:58:11 05/01/07 (0)
• Re: First pictures with external strobe Jim Lyle 07:31:55 05/01/07 (0)