I posted this yesterday on scubaboards, but haven't gotten any respoonses yet so I thought I'd try here.
I've come to the point that I'm convinced I need to get a strobe for my Coolpix P3 (I use it in a Fantasea FP-4 housing) and am looking for some advice/feedback.
Some brief info re my camera: no hotshoe, it does fire a single preflash that cannot be turned off and I have not found any way to adjust the output of the internal flash. Most of my photogrpahy is either in the green Chilean waters up to about 60ft depth (usually in 20-40ft) or tidepooling (where I can't use a flash anyways). Right now I'm shooting mostly macro stuff, but I'd like to bring more light with me UW in order to start playing with WA.
I know the general rule of thumb is to get as much strobe as you can afford, but I'm a biologist in Chile and while my salary has plenty of zero's on it, it doesn't convert into much buying power. Therefore, I have an absolute limit of $400 that I can spend on a strobe setup.
Sea&Sea is having a closeout on the YS-60's for $150 w/ an arm (although it's short, it's a start) and the 5-pin connector LINK plus $20 for a base. I know this strobe won't work as is with my camera, but according to the list of supported strobes on the Heinrichs-Weikamp website LINK, it should work with their optical Digital Adapter, even doing the preflash on "almost every digital compact camera". With that at $129 LINK, the whole setup will come in well under my $400 limit (leaving me a good chunk of $ to put towards a WA adapter).
Any comments or other suggestions?
BTW, I don't see a DSLR in my future anytime soon. When the time comes to upgrade my camera, I'll ptobably go for something along the lines of the Canon Powershot G9/Nikon Coolpix 5100 (or equivalent when that time comes).
