TTL Anonymous

Ok, ok guys, you convinced me, with so many great fish shots in manual exposure I have to admit that I have no reason for sticking with film (I never tried shooting manual with film, so maybe that where my dependence to TTL comes from).

I was ready to click the order button (for a D70 and a Sea&Sea housing), but then I saw someone mention a possible D90 on this tread; if there is one other thing that I rely heavily on for my fish shots is fast and precise AF. I think I will wait a little longer and see if a Nikon camera with a better AF than the F80 appears next year.

Luiz

someone mention a possible D90 on this tread

And so the technology merry-go-round continues.....

There will always be a better dslr "just" about to be announced. With housings appearing six months later. Nikon will definately produce a D100 upgrade but no one knows when or what it will be. The rumors are started by overzealous gearheads with too much time on their hands. I'd say anything like this is pretty far in the future.

If you want to start using digital now or if you have a trip planned I'd go with a D70 for Nikon kit or wait for the 20D for Canon.

As soon as you get a D90 they will be "just" about to announce a better one that takes just as good of pictures as yours does.

someone mention a possible D90 on this tread

 

And so the technology merry-go-round continues.....

<snip>

As soon as you get a D90 they will be "just" about to announce a better one that takes just as good of pictures as yours does.

While ordinarily I would agree, right now I would not be buying a dSLR. In fact, I am/was almost desperate to buy one, I am heading off to Barcelona for five days and then a couple of days at altitude in the Spanish Pyrennees in two weeks time and I would dearly love to have a dSLR with me, rather than the huge bricks of film I have sitting in my fridge right now. But with Photokina as close as it is, and with the current crop of dSLRs being not quite what I desire (though, admittedly, the d100 turned out to be a bit better than I expected in real world usage), I can't/wont buy one right now. So I made up for it by buying another lens instead . By the time I get back from Spain (mid-September), I expect a lot of announcements will have been made and the playing field will be plainly on view for the next couple of years at least.

I loved my TTL - if I could do TTL with my D70 without my mamoth housed SB800 I would, but I like to port mount my compact Sea and Sea strobe with their great colour temp (for macro). As my preference is my small strobes I stopped using the TTL setup and now take pics all manual because the its not nearly as "finicky" as I thought it would be. Saying that - if my SnS 90s and 30s could talk to my D70 in TTL language I sure would have them switched onto TTL.

Hi!

There's an explanation why TTL is causing so much troubles with digital cameras.

In the beginning, there was a simple extra pin that signalled "stop" to the strobe. The signal came from a sensor that measured the light reflected by the film surface. Pretty simple and straight forward.

Nowadays, a strobe has to identify itself with model, serial number and firmware version to be recognized by the camera in the first place. That's one of the problems. Manufacturers keep these protocols from the public. The other change is, that the chip doesn't reflect the light in the way film did. What you do now, is a short pre-flash to get a feeling of the light situation and then fire accordingly. To do this, you need a strobe that recovers from the first short flash very quickly to be right in time for the main sensation. It's easy if you have to handle a low power strobe only but may be hard to achieve with a 200WS flashgun. Most UW strobes have their weak points in being fast enough to cope with this. The problem is that different manufacturers do it in several different ways according to the evolution of their own strobe development.

The pre-flash adds shutter delay. If you wait for too long, the light situation may change in the meantime. I wonder if some animals are fast enough to see these two flashes as separate events and act on the first one.

Helge ;-)=)

Granted, correcting a badly exposed image comes at a price that might be too high.

Getting it right is the objective weall strive for. However, for the average photographer, there is a definitive advantage there, as it was the case with print film.

More importantly, any method TTL or not has its merits. What counts is that one masters a technique and then get creative. And getting creative using TTL sometimes is more complicated than when one is using manual exposure.

If the picture gets the message across, the technique does not matter.

Michel

Helge:

the strongest Sea&Sea, the YS350, does work very well with digital preflash cameras (With digital adapter). Technically, I don't see the problem for big strobes. You're right with the protocol issues anyway....

A few comments ago there was an email about why ttl was problematic on dSLRs. Well, if you look at the Fuji S2Pro which features conventional ttl it is clear that there cannot be a really significant problem. I don't know exactly why 'conventional' ttl was not retained in most dSLRs but do have my own pet theory!

If you look at the sensors in most dSLRs they are very dark in colour. The S2Pro has a lighter sensor. Could it simply be that there is insufficient reflected light to enable 'conventional' ttl to work I wonder? And is this why the Fuji only operates ttl up to an ISO400 equivalence?

Can anyone shed light on this?!

Digital sensors don't reflect as much light as film does and that's the reason. While the S2 offers TTL up to a point, the S3 will not. Apparently TTL is problematic even for Fuji.

I've always had great luck with TTL, for everything from semi-WA, a 20 mm lens on an n90s in an ike housing and dome, to macro. I've had equally good luck using canon G2 and ike's optical slave TTL unit and DS-50 strobes.

So often, I find myself slowly moving, tracking or paralleling a subject, say some wrasse that is CONSTANTLY on the move. I'm trying to pretend I'm ignoring it, so it will learn I'm not after it, and let me get some fraction closer. Suddenly, it turns right towards me, from 6 feet away, and suddenly is in my focus spot, from 18 inches, when I never expected to get closer than 3 feet. Seems to me, TTL is the ONLY way to get that shot...

I've found that I almost always want to dial in some reduction in the flash exposure compensation, but it seems to be really easy to see when a scene will fool it, and by how much, and dial accordingly. I think I easily have a 90+% first shot exposure success this way. It is hard for me to believe that manual, one would get that success rate, for first shots, in a situation...

One interesting thing, is the minolta A2, which has a flash exposure mode which strictly applies the guide number rule, using the subject distance. No pre-flash, no during exposure measurement, but it does control the length of the firing. Bet this would work real well, cause it is so simple, and be easy to learn to compensate, without doing the math, each shot.

Or do you all not do the math, but just go by feel?

Don

My name is Robert, and I last TTL'ed three days ago. I can't give it up.

Seriously, TTL was probably the main (but not the only) reason I went with the Fuji S2 instead of a Nikon digital. I've become used to shooting TTL u/w for both macro and (most) wide-angle, and didn't see why I should give it up if I don't have to.

Like a previous poster, I routinely dial in negative flash exposure compensation (usually -0.7 with Ike SS200s, less with my back-up Sea&Sea strobes). No settings works perfectly, but once zeroed in its good over quite a range. I don't think I'd be getting every frame perfectly-exposed-no-bracketing if I were shooting manual strobe either.

The big plus, for me, is being able to respond quickly to a new subject, different angle, move in closer to a subject (or when the subject moves close to me).

If I had a strobe controller on the housing that would allow me to change power settings on both strobes without having to swim out to each end of my long arms every time I changed the aperture or distance to subject, I might be more interested in experimenting with manual strobe for TTL than I am.

Frogfish

Hi, My name is Nick, I have been using TTL with my Aquatica N90 housing for a long time and now with my new Aquatica A70 I won't be able too use it any more and I'm scarred! :shock:

I accept I will have to do everything in manual (in strong surge current this can be tricky). Anyone have any links or references in mind to help me learn? This is all new to me. I'm encouraged by most of you who have been doing a great job without. I also find comfort in the fact that I will be able to review my picts u/w and delete, and delete, and delete, as needed.

I have two SB-105s and a new Aquatica housed D70.

HELP!

Nick

Hi My name is Jean, and i was a TTL addict until I went cold turkey, wish it did change my life, but alas I still shoot up and come up with result. So detox is not so hard.

We, as a community, are concerned by TTL, and we should, I ask nothing better than to have the option and use it if I need to get THAT shot. TTL already exist in various form, E-TTL, I-TTL, D-TTL, ETC... in various Sunpak and Sigma flashes among other, so the technollogy is there.The point I want to get too is. Why are the strobe maker not more pro active in this area, it is in my opinion that they should be ajusting to the new trade, making converter built-in the housing is fine, but would'nt it be better to just get the flash you need and plug it in, then just add water.

My two (canadian) cents worth.

It is a fair question, Jean, but I guess it comes down to company size and money available for R&D. In the end the likes of Sigma and Sunpak are selling far more flashes than the likes of Ikelite and Inon, and therefore have the money to invest in decoding and replicating all the new flash protocols. Having re-read that I think I am just stating the obvious, that I am sure you already know.

I do agree with your final point - that we the consumers should demand more. I think once one of the UW strobe manufacturers has these protocols reliably cracked then the rest will be forced to invest and respond (assuming that we the customers vote with our dollars, Canadian cents or Pounds etc)!

Alex

Hello Alex, the night, being as always, a time to reflect, I got up went diving trought my pile of xenon substained technollogy and fished out a Sunpak Marine auto 2400, and like the ignored poor bastard that it was, upon not even so close inspection it stand out that this is a Sea & Sea YS-50 in drag. Mmmm we say! These fellas were bed fellows once upon a time, so why not rekindle this forgoten flame of collaboration.

Come on, you flashy devices creator, break the ice (and go diving if your in Montreal) and get a head start. technollogy goes only one way and losing TTL underwater is not an option it should be a choice we make.

Again, my two (Canadian) cents, Hey Alex what the exchange rate for two cents Canadian must .00005 pounds or something.

This is just to give you a clear example of my dependence to TTL. The shot below was taken a few weeks ago in Belize, this was the first (and only) time I saw this blenny, it is about 3cm long (one inch for the imperial people). I had this one chance, took the picture, and it was gone never to be seen again. I think this would be very hard to accomplish without TTL, that's why I am waiting (and counting) on IKE to develop iTTL (and hopefully on Nikon for a replacement for the D100).

There is always the Fuji S2!

Why wait!!

At 1799 I would prefer a Canon 20D and Ike's eTTL, but I will give Nikon another chance and wait for the D100 replacement (my F100 will keep working on the mean time, I still have a few rows of slide film left), I hope Ike comes up with iTTL by then...

You can get shots like that as long as you're prepared. Committing to manual with digital is easier than film. Of all the problems to worry about TTL is not the biggest.

I agree with Graig, be a boy scout and be prepared, it be nice to have TTL available allthe time, but like we say in french, c'est la vie ! I have a Fuji S2pro in an Aquatica housing (figure's) and a pair of Nikon D100 in housings (Aquatica needless to say), but somehow always managed to have the non TTL set-up when oportunity knocked, well you know what, I went back to old school, back in the early 70's when I started (don't laugh James, I am that old) TTL was a pipe dream. Hell automatic flashes were just starting to appear on the market, you just nosed your way trough a proper exposition,

It made me go back to basic, and now I make the picture more than I take it, going simple as a definite plus, you have to be attune to your set-up a lot more, and that, in the end make the difference. TTL and all is good, knowing your gear, even better, so when you need TTL you'll not end up at F:22 with a subject at 1.5 meter anyway. Can't stop progress, but we must all be patient with this new technollogy, what took years in film to devellop, we expect in month for digital. this digital business as yet to settle down, we have gone trough at least four different TTL protocol in the last years or so. Boy am I glad I'm not in the business of making strobes these days. I root for you Ike ! :wink: