HI Rob
Firstly
Your thinking along the correct liine with your Aperture settings but F32 i dont think is going to be much use.
I basically use upto F22 but mostly around F10-F16 for Max depth of field.
Shooting A mode is not the best thing to do.
When the nikon camera is placed into a mode other than M it will always try and balance your exposure or give you what it thinks is a correct exposure.
now due to the fact that you might be using a 2 pin wired housing the camera wont even know that you have a flash present on you system so the balanced fill flash function will not work.
The easiest way with maco is simply to preset using M mode. i tend to use F13 1/125 to start with and go with it from there using my strobes as the main light to paint the picture.
Think about what the camera would do if you try using A mode, setting F13 @ iso 100 will give you about 1/15 or less underwater because the camera is giving you an exposure for what you are pointing it at and not knowing that you have 2x flash guns to provide the light for this shot.
Hand holding a 105mm at 1/15 is only a recipe for BLURRED camera shaken images.
use M on your camera and if you wish to adjust the background exposure of you shot you can reduce your shutter speed until you getting the desired effect, you can use the aperture a litte but remember that using aperture to control you background with do 2x things
1x reduce your Depth of Field
2x adjust the power of you flash
your using inon guns so there is lots of settings for power adjustment, so you can drop a stop or two on aperture but watch the DOF .
As for you using the 2x on a 105mm,,, remember you will get a 2 stop light loss, and an eqiv focal length of 300mm....!!! you have got to hand hold that, the age old rule of Shutter speed = Focal length of lens needs running through your head when using this combo.
to be honest about it your better off using a wet dioptre or a close up filter, you will get no light loss then
its no use shooting 1/60sec @ 300mm, you'll just get SHAKE.
your DOF using the 2x will be very very shallow, so you'll try and use a very narrow aperture to increase the DOF, but you have a 2 stop light loss so you going to need to be VERY VERY close with those strobes to punch in light to make the shot when that 2x tele is attached
when i used my 60mm with a 2x TC i found that using F10 to F8 often gave me the lighting result i was looking for but the DOF was extremely shallow.
with all that then..
use MANUAL mode on the camera
Aperture and strobe setting to control the exposure of your subject
Shutter speed to address the background exposure of your shot and to compensate for SHAKE.
happy shooting
craig
