Focus lights??

i need a focus light..

I´ve found the http://fisheyeusa.com/mini.led.php.

Does anybody have any experience with it? And do you know if it vil work with an dslr Ikelite housing and DS-125 stobe?

Any other suggestions?

kind regards

Mads

I´ve found the http://fisheyeusa.com/mini.led.php.

Does anybody have any experience with it? And do you know if it vil work with an dslr Ikelite housing and DS-125 stobe?

Hi Mads,

A friend of mine purchased the focus light you mention and has been happy with it. I own the Fisheye FIX HG20DX and have found it very useful in my underwater photography adventures. There definitely are differences between the two focus lights. One of the differences is that the LED focus light you're talking about uses standard AA alkaline batteries instead of the dedicated lithium ion (and much more expensive) battery that the HG20X uses. The HG20X uses a halogen bulb whereas the LED focus light uses 8 LED bulbs. Another big difference is the burn time which is rated at 6 hours for the LED compared to only 55 to 200 minutes for the HG20X.

There is also a good thread about focus lights that was posted on Wetpixel recently.

As to your question about working with an Ikelite housing and DS125 strobe, I am not familiar with the Ikelite housing. I own a Subal housing and there is a place on top of the housing to mount the focus light. Perhaps Ikelite owners might want to jump in with how they attach focus lights to their housing.

As far as using the focus light with your strobe, as far as I know the focus lights work equally well with all strobes.

Hope that helps,

Ellen

Thanks Ellen.

Its allways nice to hear others opinion before buying something.

I´ll try and find the other thread.

kind regards

mads

I attach my focusing lamp to my Ike using a three way ULCS clamp. My lamp is a 1 watt Aquatec which I diffuse using an opaque 35mm film tub.

I also use a small focus light (Fantasea nano) on a 3-way ball clamp from the first (top) joint of one of my Ikelite tray arms. Another technique I've seen is just to use rubber bands or velcro straps to wrap it alongside the strobe body, but this means you have to have the strobe pointed 'at' the desired focus direction, instead of using the edge of the light cone. The DS125 has its own light as well, though, so that would be kind of redundant.

Someone else posted that they used something like JBweld to glue an extra ball adaptor to the top of their Ikelite housing, for their focus light. I haven't had the guts to try something like that yet. The 3-way clamp works pretty well, except every time you adjust you strobe arms you also end up having to tweak the focus light a bit too. But it's really not that big a deal. One of these days I'll get a picture of my setup, but it's not too substantially different from the pic in this post from the Classified forum (I actually bought this guy's arms and dome port, except my focus light is on a shorter adaptor since I didn't buy his larger one:)

http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showt...st&p=159081

It is easy to flood this light. To turn this light on you have to unscrew the battery/lamp cap. My wife flooded hers last trip. Mine is still working and for the most part I like it.

I'm not sure about you but I like having alot of available light especially when doing night dives. Then again I do alot of cold water diving where you don't typically get as much available light as warmer waters. I actually use a UK Light Canon and it has tons of burn time (6 Hours) and just about the brightest thing ever (for the money). I put 2 diffuser filters on it because of it's power and bought 2 factory battery packs with it. I use it on all my dives (weather I have it on or not) and it make a wonderful night light. It is much larger than the Fisheye FIX light but then again with my housing and strobes, it's the smalles thing on my rig : )

I previously owned a Fisheye FIX light and switched to this for the simplicity of not having dual lights..... a focus light and night light. For back up my sea & sea strobes can power on if necessary to get me thru a night dive. The burn time is great on the Light Canon because you can do repetitive dives and not have to worry about changing batteries every dive. It will usually last me about 3 dives I'd say.

Hopes that helps

Vance

I'm not a big fan of huge floodlights on night dives. For one thing I wear one of them fugly Hydrooptix masks, so my FOV is so wide every other diver's lights dangling on their leashes when they're adjusting their masks or whatnot are always magically pointed at my peripheral vision. For another, a lot of the nighttime scenery 'hides' when you hit it with bright lights. Brittle stars and the like will curl back into their holes, etc.

Plus on a lot of the Flower Gardens night dives, the jacks and other predators have learned to hunt with scuba divers as their proxies. Light up a fish, go to signal your buddy to take a look, and *pow* you're lighting up silt and a few bits as it gets hit. I actually night dive with my hand mostly over my light to just let a little illumination thru, and would prefer to do the same with my focus light (red filter or whatnot).

Once I'm back up the water column though, watching gauges for ascent, or looking for the mooring line etc, I'm back to wanting full brightness though.

Hi Mads

I have this light, and love it.

I attach it via a triple clamp at the top of the handle.

The auto cut out for your main strobe worked well and I got no hot spots

It gives a perfectly adequate amount of light, that is quite a gentle spread which does not overly upset the night life. My only gripe is that it seemed to attract krill by the dozen which had an irritating habit of getting in front of the subject.

Whilst it is theoretically possible to unscrew the top and flood the light, common sense says to stop twisting the cap when the light comes on. Most flooding accidents occur when you try to turn the light off, persisting on screwing the wrong way. Anyway, it is entirely possible to leave it on for the whole dive, the battery drain is minimal, and it can be used as your main dive light.

Here is an example of it in action

Cheers

Hal