1 or 2 substrobes?

When shooting with a wide angle lens such as the Ikelite W-20, is it better to use one or two substrobes?

If so, why is it better to use two substrobes rather than one?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Always 2, you get more wide an even cover, besides diminish hard shadows.

There is a whole forum about lighting here in wetpixel, expend some time there and you will find a lot of good material.

Most UW photographers prefer to use two strobes when shooting wide angle. I certainly do. Many of the wide angle lenses we use underwater are very wide - and two strobes make it much easier to illuminate the whole subject.

That said, wide angle with one strobe is not impossible by any means. This shot was taken with a 180 degree fisheye and lit with a single strobe, which I think has produced a pleasing result:

Of course normally I would have used two strobes for this sort of subject matter (this picture was a test shot - see the next issue of UWP Magazine - which is why I was using a single strobe).

Many of us are so ingrained in our use of twin strobes that we forget single strobes work too!

Alex

one advantage of two is that during a dive if one dies you still have the other. You can always choose to use one or two depending on what you want to do.

If you have two you can always turn one off. I like them to be identical. That way it is easy to vary the power to give you ratioed lighting.

I prefer to dive with two and switch off the secondary strobe if I only want one.

Note that with the Ikelite dual strobe system, if you lose the primary strobe (one connected with no band on the cable) the secondary doesn't work.