Dave_Hicks

I actually dislike the "spotlight" effect of a snoot and much prefer to include a fill flash at low power or to hit the subject from the side with the snoot. This lets me isolate the subject from the background and does not create that spotlight. So, I am not looking for crisp edges at all. Here are a couple of shots I took yesterday with a Backscatter MF-2 snoot and HF-1 for fill light. null

Ok then, do you need two focus lights? Using a focus light on a strobe means you have to point the strobe directly at your subject. This is rarely the best way to light a subject. You really should get a dedicated and more functional focus light anyways.

Do you need the focus light to work? I only ever turn it on by accident.

Cool. Thanks for sharing. 3mm is not much more than what I used, but I have not tried upping the extrusion multiplier. I also stayed at a standard 0.2mm layer height. I will consider your formula when I try a new project. I need some better arm floats for the heavier HF-1 strobes, so I may have another project shortly.

These is very little difference between the two unless you have very specific requirements. After consideration I saw no advantage of hoping up to the X1. I am very happy with the P1s.

Please share a profile or setting for how you do this. I found that to get a good balance of weight vs buoyancy and strength to not implode, printing with 4-5 walls and minimal infill provides enough strength. Epoxy takes care of the waterproofness for minimal cost in weight.

I've made some waterproof parts with my 3d printers. To the best of my knowledge, you can't expect any 3d printed plastic to be fully waterproof under pressure. You need to do some post printing process to treat and seal it. Acetone smoothing, resin, etc. I've successfully created and tested a Nauticam m87 & m60 port float that can add about 10 ounces of buoyancy to my rig. I printed it in PLA+ on my Bambu P1S and on my earlier Creality Ender 3 S1. I printed with 5 walls perimeters, 8% infill. To finish and seal the print I painted it with a layer of epoxy resin. This has worked great and has been tested up to 80-90 feet and used on about 5-6 dives so far. I plan to add a carbon fiber wrap to it soon for better durability. If you plan to spend $1000 you should buy a Bambu P1S Combo (w/AMS) no question. Get 3 colors of PLA and 1 on PETG to get started. Maybe a TPU later on for specialty objects. The P1S will get you going fast and work great. I started with the Creality last year as it requires more tweaking, tuning, and trail/error, but I learned a lot. I replaced it with the Bambu and it's so much better in every way. null Pictures:

Only 150 flashes from 8 AA batteries? That seems to be shockingly bad performance. I did 9 days in Palau a couple weeks ago and was getting over 400 flashes from 4x AA Eneloop Pros. Mostly at 1/2 to 1/4 power, sometimes higher in the shallows.

A bathtub is not going to help. If your vacumm didn't fail, but you got a leak on a dive the difference would be from a few extra atmospheres of pressure at depth.

I will be shooting with my new HF-1 strobes today in Puget Sound. I am using the same (home made, 3d printed rubber) S&S style connectors that fit the MF-2, Inon 330, etc. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6134211

I would think that it's perfectly OK to use this if it's been stored in a reasonable location. Tens years is not that long for the materials in a dome port. I've got an 8.5" Nauticam acrylic dome at least that old or older. No worries about it at all.

The post processing above did the trick, but your shutter speed of 1/200s is pretty fast if you were going for a rich and bright colored background. Shutter speed should be your #1 tool for getting the water color you desire, before ISO or aperture. At the surface there may be lots of light, but I think you shut it down too far. Try moving from 1/100 in bright light to faster shutters as needed.

Never leave your camera in a rinse tank, especially if you don't have a vacuum on your housing. There is no pressure to squeeze the port and back together so the port oring can be dislodged and leak with ease. If you have a working vacuum, you have bigger issues. Likely a leaking button or knob.

The poor reliability of multi S&S models over the years is well know. Their sub-standard and disappointing service and repair policies are also well know. That is easy to measure and track. Let's see some reporting on that. Sadly, the testing driven by manufacturers and retailers does not consider or value this. I would like to see the strobe brands compete on customer service as well as features.

None of these test images or graph can tell me if a new strobe is going to burn out the day after the warranty expires. That data point is infinitely more important that the degree of light fall-off at the edges of a swimming pool. The reality is that award winning images have been made with every single one of these strobe models. They are all capable of contributing to the creation of incredible artwork in the right hands. Buy the one that you can afford and trust for reasonable service &support with a set of features you value.

Most likely yes. Make sure your charger supports the USB PD (power delivery) spec. Most of them do.

Yes, it is. Do I need to send you a picture of mine plugged in to a USB-C cord? The picture I shared also says that it is. How much assurance do you need? RTFM

The site seemed to be returning "bad gateway" errors for a while.

Looks at this Nitecore 4 bay charger that will support 21700s and 18650s for $30. The 21700 is becoming more popular and I would not buy a charge today that didn't cover that cell size. This is also a USB-C powered charger. I run all my chargers off a fairly power 65W+ USB brick, eliminating as many AC power cords as possible.

Those two Fiji pictures are classic Wide-Angle images of a large subject. The reefs in the pics are probably 3 meters across or a bit more. Most acceptable wide-angle strobe lit images have to be within 1-2 meters or you might as well turn off the strobes. I was probably no more than 1.5 meters from the front of the reef. CFWA is typically just centimeters from the subject, and smaller macro powered strobes like the Inon 220 would be better suited for that sort of shot than a wide able image in your examples and mine. To be blunt, I question your taste if you think those test shorts were properly exposed. They are grey and unsaturated, not reflecting any of the real-world color in the soft corals, fish, or hard coral reef. Your test shots should at least be exposed well enough to make post processing worthwhile to create an aesthetically pleasing image.

Yes, exactly. These test chart shots are largely irrelevant to real world use. It's nice to see for relative power levels but must "full powered" strobes in the market are all going to deliver similar results. The far more useful metrics are in Reliability, Serviceability, Portability, and Utility (user interface, features). As we've seen with Sea&Sea, they had a lot of failures coupled with a very poor customer service and repair story. Backscatter had reliability problems with the (early) MF-1 strobes but came out ahead with a stellar service. Retra adds a lot of great features and luxury parts (bluetooth firmware updates, flash tubes). Ikelite has always been reliable and has great battery packs, but have always been bulky and heavy. Inon is the Toyota of Strobes with great function and reliability, but lack fancy features or a sexy part list. Backscatter is still evolving being with their first foray with the MF-1 and MF-2 small/snoot strobes, and entering the full power market with the HF-1 which as great specs. I'll have a pair of HF-1s tomorrow, and I'll see how well the work soon. I usually dive a couple days a week and will take these out right away.

Here are a pair of images of similar wide angle reef subjects in Fiji. The first is from 2012 taken with DS-125s on a D800 with No Diffusers [Sigma 15mm, 1/80s, f6.3, iso100] This second was taken with Inon-330s on a D850 with No Diffusers [Sigma 15mm, 1/80s, f13, iso320]

These are both pretty poor quality images that are not properly illuminated or exposed. Assuming you didn't crop, the shot below with the brighter area is take from a closer position than the one above which might explain illumination difference. I can't tell which one of these has a diffuser on it. Regardless, Inon 220's don't have any right to be making useful images of a scene that wide even if they aspire to WA. I don't know enough about the Marelux models to comment.

My point (which I didn't make clearly) is that I would be interested in seeing how these strobes perform on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd shot in a 1 second burst. Are all 3 (or 12, 20, 30) shots delivering a similar level of illumination or is there are power drop off with later shots? How do the various strobes perform in these burst shot modes? With new strobes coming on the market with more power, Li-on cells, and the ability to support more than one shot per second, this is going to be the new, and actually relevant metric to judge these strobes. I've shot Ikelike DS-125, DS-161, Inon 330, and Retra strobes over the years. I'd be hard pressed say that one delivered better image results than another. I moved between models based on portability, useability, and reliability over the years. I never found any of these strobes to be dramatically better in producing useful images than the others. I do feel very limited by not being able to take more than one shot per second in high speed action situations, and look forward to experimenting with this ability.

Can you share a real world photo that shows the negative impact of a hotspot?