Hello,

Way back in 2011 I bought a Canon 7D and ikelite housing (80mm lens for macro), and sea and sea strobe via TTL sync cord. Everything worked well. Fast forward to 2023, I dug everything out of the case as I booked a dive trip, and I updated the firmware on the camera, erasing all the settings I had previously (dumb move on my part). Problem I was having on the first couple of dives was getting a solid black, horizontal line in the bottom 1/3 of the photo. In conversation with another diver with a camera he suggested I needed to go from 1st to second curtain in my settings. Between the 1st and second dives I pulled the camera out of the housing to make the changes and neglected to turn off the strobe. When I was reinserting the camera into the housing I hit the shutter button and the strobe fired full blast as the protective cover was over the front port. This fried the strobe. So I was never able to test if this solved the issue. Has anyone experienced a similar issue? Do you think that was the issue? He described it as the mirror still being in the way (on 1st curtain).

Thank you in advance!

T

Edited 4 hours ago4 hr by Titanite
additional detail

What was your shutter speed? If you set the shutter faster than the sync speed of the camera, you get a partly black vertical band. A quick search says the max sync (shutter) speed for the Canon 7D is 1/250th of a second. Anything faster than that will create a black curtain.

I dont remember what shutter speed I had. I was wondering if this was an issue after losing all my previous settings and knowing myself, I was probably "trying a bunch of different things to see if I could get rid of the black horizontal line", then the strobe cratered before I learned anything.

Edited 4 hours ago4 hr by Titanite

You should be able to look at the meta data in an image file to see the shutter speeds and other settings.