After a couple of years shooting with my Oly-5050 in an Ikelite housing I am ugrading too.
I recently purchased a D200 and am looking into a housing. I have looked into the Ikelite since I have good experience with the 5050 housing. Having a Light&Motion Bluefin video housing for my Sony A1E, I am also looking into the Titan. But at this point in time I do not want to fork over $4500 for a housing and another couple of 1000 for ports (and strobes).
One thing I keep in mind is that I already have 2 Ikelite DS125 strobes. I would really like to use these with my new housing (because of the $$$).
A short while ago I bumped into the Sealux website. Does anyone of you have experience with this brand? What I like about it is that it has a housing for the Nikon SB-800 flash (I know I am contradicting myself but I happen to own 2 of these as well).
Cheers,
Oscar.
Sealux make good housings. They are not popular/distributed in N America - so you don't hear about them much on Wetpixel. But they are much more popular in Europe.
All three housings that you mention, Sealux, Ikelite and L & M would be compatible with the DS-125 strobes.
I would not worry too much about housing a SB-800. While it will get you TTL it will also restrict you to using one strobe.
Alex
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your quick reply. However, it raises another question: why woud I be restricted to 1 strobe when I use the SB-800?
Oscar.
the wireless connection (Nikon CLS - creative lighting system) does not work underwater. You would have to hardwire 2 SB-800 for iTTl underwater. there was a thread on this setup. make a search in the forum.
My understanding is that the only way to get it working is to have one SB-800 wired electronically to the camera and the other joined fibre-optically to the first (so it can see the IR signal used to control the CLS slave strobes). But I have never tried it myself.
Re. dual SB800 strobes: this is possible using clear polycarbonate housings such those produced by Fantasea using fibre optic between master and remote (slave). For details see: http://www.gans.co.nz/dive/SB800_Dual/index.htm
Using two SB800 strobes offers the advantage when using auto FP high speed synchronization to unreservedly go beyond the camera's top sync shutter speed of 250s. The SB800s can be used in both iTTL or manual modes.
