Help with what strobes to buy!

Hi all,

First of all thanks for all the info on this site its awesome.

I been a photographer for a few years professionaly, but im totally new to Diving photography.

I just recently bought an old housing to try this kind of photography and im trying to assamble a cheap cheap kit, so i can find out if this will get into me or not.

So far i bought a Nx 90Z housing for a N90 or F90, and a 8" dome from Sea & sea.

Im gonna start using it with a tokina 10-17, and i know its not a full frame lens, but at 17mm will be good enough to find out if i like this or not.

Im about to get the Strobes, and im considering buying the YS 60 from Sea & sea because they seem to be the cheapest.

The ones im finding are YS60/S not the N version, and im not sure if that really is important!

Are they compatible with that housing? can i use them ? they say is TTL, but is there anything im missing here?

can't really find any info on compatibility or anything, the only thing i found is that they dont trigger optically, but as far as i can set them up in TTL or even in manual should be ok to start with.

And another question, does anyone uses those flashes aswell outside? i mean, are they like normal strobes? because that way i could use them in some of my dry photography aswell!

thanks very much!

A few (non-expert) responses:

Yes, you can use underwater strobes above water, in the sense that they do flash, and being designed for underwater use even the weaker ones are pretty strong for air use. Be careful not to fire them off too quickly as they won't have water to help cool them. And they will of course be much heavier and not as useful as most above-water strobes (which do things like high-speed sync, give full TTL communication on hotshoes, wireless control of other slave strobes, etc.) The other thing it depends on is can you achieve a connection to the camera without the camera also being in the housing? There aren't really any cables that go straight from a camera's hotshoe to the type of input connectors that underwater strobes usually use. So an optical triggering strobe would work (from slaving to the camera's built-in flash), or some sort of optical slave sensor like Ikelite's ( http://www.ikelite.com/web_pages/mansensors.html ) can be cabled to their strobes to provide the optical triggering...but that's paying as much as for a reasonable above-water strobe, so kind of defeats the purpose.

If you really want to shoot wider angle (17mm focal length) you may find that getting the smallest strobes is very underpowered and limiting. But I do understand you're just starting and want to go cheaper. Might search on say eBay for some used DS50 or DS51's from Ikelite. You can usually get them for $200-300 each, and they're fairly powerful for lower-guide-number strobes. Shooting 17mm (sorry for my ignorance, don't know if the camera you're on is a crop or FF?) you might find the best shots with limited strobe light are sort of "close focus wide angle" where you can get somewhat close to a subject to light it in the foreground, but let the background be ambient lit. Search on this site for some articles by Alex Mustard on the subject. With an 8" dome you can't really get super "close" but that's still basically the type of shot I think you might find works the best. True wide angle shots (nice reefscapes and the like) take a lot more light than you'll get from the smaller strobes to be truly satisfying. Of course macro photography also requires far less light, but that's going to need a longer lens (usually 50mm-100mm, or even higher if you're on a FF sensor!) and not as easy to get nice and close with a bigger dome port.

You probably can't shoot ttl with that rig but so what? Except for macro and fast moving subjects the majority of experienced underwater photographers shoot the strobes in manual. You should look for USED strobes that are strong. Weak strobes will fustrate you big time. What are the cable fittings on the housing?

Tom