UK Light Cannon

Hi Folks,

Background:

My wife wants to try her hand at UW photography but refuses to handle the size and bulk of a housed DSLR (there goes my excuse of buying a 5D!) . So, I've set her up with my Canon A80, Canon WP housing, Inon WA lens and soon to order a Magic Filter. She will pretty much only use the setup in tropical, brightly lit waters.

Question:

I've thought of using the Underwater Kinetics HID Light Cannon instead of a strobe. I saw the earlier posting about using HID lights but that was in Puget Sound, not in the tropics. Has anyone used this setup? How well does it work?

Thanks

Stu

Hi,

Whilst I've not used that exact setup, I have used a Oly 5050 + Epoque WA lens with both the Fisheye light and various other HID and Halogen options.

The solution works ok for macro only, but is certainly no where near as nice as having strobes. I found having the power level adjustment on the Fisheye torch very handy, as at full power it would over expose macro shots.

I'm not familar with the UK Cannon 100, but it looks quite big/heavy to be mounted on the flex arm or lock line, which is how I had the various lights mounted.

For wide angle shots I also used a red filter mounted to the front of the epoque WA lens. It worked very well, but I was taking shots in RAW format which offered lots of flexibility later to adjust color and the exposure of the macro shots.

I'm a big fan of the function/price of the magic filter, however think that perhaps a push on filter by canon or similar for the canon housing may be a more flexibible option as you could remove it underwater.

ds.

No, this pretty much won't work. You can't replace a strobe with a flashlight and expect much from it. For the Light Cannon in particular, you would get very blue pictures due to the color of the beam it puts out. To get any light from it at all in the exposure you'd need to use very slow shutter speeds which is likely to spoil most pictures.

FYI, it actually tried doing this once when I began a dive and discovered that I forgot to connect the hotshoe on the camera to the internal strobe cable...

Dave

I've used the Light Cannon in the past with moderate succes for macro shots only.

If your primary concern is bulk and weight, (not $$$), I'd suggest you get your wife an Inon strobe (a D-2000, if you can get your hands on one, or the newer D-2000W). It's about 1/3 the size and weight of a Light Cannon, is a dedicated underwater strobe with good performance, and even incorporates a modelling light.

Mat