Shutting off Internal flash on 7D

7D newbie here. I took a bunch of natural light photos recently with my canon 7D+tokina10-17+nauticam setup typically from within swim throughs or wrecks. My process was to first turn off my inon strobes and then bump up the ISO a bit. The pics looked great in the lcd review but after I loaded them on my computer and adjusted the exposure a bit I noticed a faint ring of light around the edge of the picture. Is this being caused by the internal flash? My first thought for future photo opportunities like this is to turn off the internal flash. I like being able to quickly switch from strobes to natural light. Do people typically use one of the custom modes to quickly turn off the flash or setup a custom menu? I guess if I can disable the internal flash easily there is no reason to power down the strobes.

7D newbie here. I took a bunch of natural light photos recently with my canon 7D+tokina10-17+nauticam setup typically from within swim throughs or wrecks. My process was to first turn off my inon strobes and then bump up the ISO a bit. The pics looked great in the lcd review but after I loaded them on my computer and adjusted the exposure a bit I noticed a faint ring of light around the edge of the picture. Is this being caused by the internal flash? My first thought for future photo opportunities like this is to turn off the internal flash. I like being able to quickly switch from strobes to natural light. Do people typically use one of the custom modes to quickly turn off the flash or setup a custom menu? I guess if I can disable the internal flash easily there is no reason to power down the strobes.

Hi jbdiver,

Nauticam sells a flash blocking ring that you can get from your Nauticam dealer (part #28109) to help eliminate the reflection that you are seeing. If you search this forum, you'll find some homemade remedies that have worked for people too, not just for Nauticam but other housings/domes as well.

You can turn your internal flash off by going to Menu->FlashControl-Flash Firing-->Disable. I add that menu item to the My Menu which makes it quick to find. Using a custom mode is a good idea. I usually just turn the strobes off. Another thing you might want to try - shoot the strobes in manual. This allows you much more control over the exposure - so that you can, for example, shoot with mostly ambient light but just accent a close subject enough to bring out it's colors. It also has the advantage that you can turn down the power on the internal flash to it's lowest setting - also helping to eliminate the internal reflection.

Cheers,

Chris