Strobes for Fantasea Housing

Hi there....

I get very nervous when I post in the photography section, so please be gentle with me!

Until recently my wife Zoe wouldn't use a SLR underwater due to the size of the housings, lack of liveview etc, but I recently finally managed to pursuade her to give it a go and bought a Fantasea housing for her Canon 350D to try it out. She played around with it and used it successfully over the christmas break in very shallow water while snorkeling and now of course she loves it, which presents me with a whole new load of trouble....strobes.

I was hoping that I could adapt her old Sealife Digital Stobes for use with the Fantasea housing, but as these are both fibre optic (slave?) stobes I'm not sure if it is possible to or not. I think I may be able to use one of them as a slave if I can find the right adapter, but would need to have a proper SLR strobe as the main strobe. Am I thinking along the right lines and if not could anyone please give me some guidance?

Also if I do have to buy her at least one new strobe what would be a good one to go for? Zoe will probably end up wanting a new camera better than the 350 after she's got comfortable with it, so ideally it would be a strobe that would be good enough for say a D200/D300 camera.

As you've probably gathered I know very little about still photography so any help would be appreciated!!

Cheers, Simon

Hi Simon;

Your Fantasea Canon sync cord has 6 pins, which allows for eTTL operation with the Canon 580EX strobe in the Fantasea F580ESII housing. It's a nice combination as the automatic features work pretty well, especially for close up and macro. The housing comes with a sync cord, you buy the strobe separately.

Yes, you could probably use the Sealife digital strobe as a second strobe in slave mode, it might need a optical sync cord from the first strobe. The use of that strobe in manual, may cause some problems to use the 580 in auto mode, I know a second manual strobe does with the Nikon SB800's TTL use, but I'm not sure with the Canon. Probably not an ideal setup, but it might work.

The other strobe I like currently for DSLRs is the Sea & Sea YS110. It would work in manual mode only, but with 13 steps of control. Manual light control requires that you adjust the control as you shoot, it takes a little getting used to but with experience it's not hard and many prefer it. It also has a focus light and will work with about any housing out there with it's standard Nikonos cable. However, for the Fantasea Canon housing it does require a 6 pin to 5 pin adapter, and you have to buy the sync cord separately. The YS110 is more powerful, has a wider beam angle and is probably a bit easier to swim with. You could use the Sealife along with it, again, not ideal, but probably workable.

I'm PMing details.

Jack