negative buoyancy problem using Greenforce lights

Hi everyone

I'm using Gates EX1 housing with Greenforce 250 lights.

While using greenforce lights, its very heavy underwater and the negative buoyancy makes my work very hard.

Do you have any suggestions to overcome this issue?

Thank you!

Have you looked here?

http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=43078

Tom

Hi everyone

 

I'm using Gates EX1 housing with Greenforce 250 lights.

 

While using greenforce lights, its very heavy underwater and the negative buoyancy makes my work very hard.

 

Do you have any suggestions to overcome this issue?

 

Thank you!

Or you could add a couple of buoyancy tubes from Gates.

Hi everyone

 

I'm using Gates EX1 housing with Greenforce 250 lights.

 

While using greenforce lights, its very heavy underwater and the negative buoyancy makes my work very hard.

 

Do you have any suggestions to overcome this issue?

 

Thank you!

I use the same housing and lights. I mount each light using an Ultralight 12" long bouyancy arm from a ball joint at the base of each handle. To overcome the tendency of the weight of the light heads to rotate the thread of one of the base ball joints I also triangulate the mounting using a 12" long Ultralight arm from the ball joint of the Gates tripod base plate (which is my standard housing base). The light head is mounted at the intersection of these two arms using a three way joint connector. One centrally placed Gates 10" bouyancy tube (I am using a top mounted HD monitor) produces a set up which is just negatively buoyant and puts the light heads far enough away from the subject to attract all the worms to the light heads rather than surrounding the subject. If I could only stop the worms also hovering in front of the bright monitor screen. I can even use the tripod with this set up with a 3 way connector at the tripod / arm ball joint. The Greenforce battery pods are mounted to the tripod base plate - I place the batteries across rather than along the line of the housing.

I've been using a couple of DIY 2x12" PVC pressure pipes on my DPV to counteract the negative buoyancy of the DSLR rig for video. Works suprisingly well for even sub 100m dives. I use Stix arms on my strobes and video lights, but that compresses at depth so I get little value past 40-50m.

I'd heard all sorts of stories that PVC pipes "don't provide enough lift" and "will implode" but I've not experienced either. For $12 it's a great solution on my scooter. Question is whether you can setup something clean on your rig, but I would have thought the top of a Gates housing would have plenty of room to do this (unlike the top of an Aquatica DSLR housing).