sony p5, what strobe to use??

Hi everyone,

sinds there are so many experts on this site, I wil just pop the question.

I am a user of a sony p5 with a sony underwaterhouse. Lots of my pictures turn out to be very green, so I am thinking of buying an external strobe. What kind of strobe would be the best to you opinion.

I have a P5 housed in MPK5, and I had exactly the same experience ...

I bought a Sea&Sea YS25DX. Apart from the problems I had with the strobe, when it was working I found that anyway it didn't help much with the colour problem ...

The P5 automatically sets the exposure correctly for embient light, so if you use a flash unit it tends to overexpose the shot. I made some progress by setting the exposure compensation as low as possible, and setting ISO as low as possible, but in the end everything was still green or blue.

Recently upgraded to an Olympus ...

One thing I did not do with the P5 is to work out how to use the "hold" option in the White Balance menu. Maybe this would help correct the colour if used properly?? I couldn't find any info in the manual.

-David

Out of curiosity I recently read a review of the P5, in which it said that the White Balance "Hold" option will use the same white balance as the previous shot.

Maybe this means that you could get good results by first taking a photo of a patch of white sand or a white object near to your subject (ie at the same total of depth + distance to subject, and in the same conditions) using the "auto" white balance, then swith to "hold" white balance, then take your shot.

I'd be interested to know whether this works ...

-David

Nope - we did a lot of experiments with my girlfriend's P5 to get better colours including an (ridiculously expensive) orange filter and taking a white chopping board down and doing several tests with the white balance settings and the mysterious 'hold' function.

All results were pretty disgusting.

see this post:

http://www.scubaboard.com/t18900/s.html

It has quite a lot of detail on how the P5 behaves with a flash.