Land based flash underwater?

Hello All,

I'm toying with the idea of converting an above water flash gun for diving? Can anyone think of any reasons why this is not a good idea ? Apart from the obvious !

My candidate is a Yongnuo 560 or 460 which I would use in manual mode, waterproof with an acrylic tube, a dome if my engineering skills can stretch to it and custom electronics to expose the manual power controls to a waterproof interface. As I only use my Canon S95 with a flash in manual mode I think it will work....There are a few examples out there for me to build on but i'm sure this has been thought about before...?

Thanks in advance!

John

BTW I'm doing it for the challenge as well as replacing my recently flooded strobe!

I've often wondered why we house cameras but not strobes. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

Maybe think about a fiber port leading to the strobe's optical slave?

The reason why no one house a land strobe is because of heat issue. Without water surround the strobe to disperse heat, your strobe will burn out very quickly, or fog up the housing. We all know that air is a bad heat conductor, so, save the headache. But if you can get it work, good for you and you could make a million and file the pattern!

Roddy used to have a 10bar housing for his canon speedlite 580ex. It was amazing for macro and eTTL but didn't cut the mustard with WA. It did flood in the end but it was only a small leak which only fried the batteries. He sold it with the 10bar housing to a surf photographer as he didn't need it to be submersible, only splash proof.

Sharon

Not sure if this helps or not but there's a Subal flash housing for an SB800 on e-bay at the moment (nothing to do with me). Cheers

Thanks for that... A bit expensive but proves it can be done... as does this ...

http://forum-photosub.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1317

http://forum-photosu...ighlight=#14339

Main limitation for underwater use is lack of coverage for wide angle, the bulk of the strobe housings, which limit strobe positioning, cold colour temp of the strobes, and expense/complexity of housings to give access to all the buttons/controls on the flash.

That said, I use a housed land flash from time to time. I have an old Subal housing, that was originally bought for an SB-26, I think. But has been used down the years with that flash and then more modern flashes, such as SB-28DX, SB-600 and now SB-700.

This picture was taken with a housed land flash - to enable me to have the fast flash synch to be able to shoot with an open aperture into the sun:

http://www.naturephotoblog.com/index.php?showimage=1106

I actually did some shots this year at 1/8000th.

Alex

That's a beautiful picture! Love the background...

Thanks Alex for the feedback, i'd forgotten about the size/bulk issue.

Until recently, all of the Olympus strobes were housed. I had the little strobe they sold for my SP-350, and it worked beautifully in ttl or manual mode. As someone else said, great for macro, but too narrow and too weak for wide angle. I've also seen a bunch of DIY posts for Vivitar strobes, which are a dime a dozen.

Here's a DIY example: http://eocean.free.fr/projects/castorstrobe/indexstr.htm

Others have used pipe, but it's awfully big that way.

Still a work in progress... got the strobe ( Yongnuo yn-460) and building the controls now.. It will be a tube design and the length of the flash is 135mm, if you remove the shoe and modify the head (its not going to swivel ever again) the length can be reduced.. Manual only of course..

I've done this with youngnuo 462 before. No heat issues. I sacrificed all controls though. You can strip the plastic of the body too if you feel brave and get a separate battery holder. Beware of high tension. I'm also using 18650 type lithium batteries instead of AA

Back when I bought my first UW camera in 1976 (I was in highschool... a Nikonos III, which still operates!) I housed a Braun strobe that I used with my old Nikon FE. It was a "potato masher" style with significant output. At that time, Ikelite would custom manufacture a housing for anything you set them. I don't remember what it cost me to do this, but it must have been pretty reasonable, since I was pretty broke.

Anyway, it worked just fine, although the "significant output" turned out to be not all that hot in the water. Bit is tided me over, until I added a Ikelite 225, which was about the size and weight of a KIA. I still have that too, and it still works!

Interesting! Pls post some pictures as you go.

Cheers

/O

Still a work in progress... got the strobe ( Yongnuo yn-460) and building the controls now.. It will be a tube design and the length of the flash is 135mm, if you remove the shoe and modify the head (its not going to swivel ever again) the length can be reduced.. Manual only of course..

Inge Lenmark is a Swedish photographer. He have always used self-built underwater strobes, based on standard strobes.

Look here:

http://www.lennmark.se/Kameror/Rollei_Metz/Frameset_en.htm