I just wanted to make a post to tell everybody about my connector flooding disaster and its happy ending. Two weeks before leaving for Cocos Island, my DS-125 connector flooded, frying the strobe and the electronics in my Ikelite 5d housing. I was thinking "dadgummit." (Well, not exactly!) I called up Ikelite, they said "No Problem, send it over, we'll check it out." Put my babies into the Fedex, and darn if they didn't fix both the strobe and the housing for free and send them back to me in California in a week. Thank you thank you thank you Ike!
BTW, this was my first trip ever with a wide angle lens (thanks to all you who helped me decide which one, Ryan, Acroporas, MikeV especially), and I was very very pleased with the performance of the 17-40 on the 5d. It autofocused perfectly on everything, even in the dark water at Cocos, without using the focusing lights on the DS-125s.
The eTTL II worked splendidly as well, but since I'm pretty new at the whole strobe bit, I was glad to be shooting raw, as I was adjusting exposures a little bit in post processing - I need to remember to use the compensation buttons on the housing.
This shot sort of sums it up the ease of using TTL now: Camera on M, exposure set for the blue, autofocus, strobes on TTL. The shark was about a meter away. I might try to blue up the water a little bit and maybe crop it, but just haven't bothered yet. Canon 5d, Dual DS-125 strobes, Canon 17-40f4L at 38mm, 1/100s, f5.6, iso 100. Alcyone dive site, Cocos Island.
