Testing gear on land vs water - what considerations?

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DeaDLocK

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Hi all,

I am completely new to underwater photography and pick up my new rig tomorrow - RX100 in a Nauticam, 2x YS-D1 strobes, 8+ macro wet lens, Inon WA with Dome wet lens.

I plan to completely familiarize myself with the housing and strobes on land first. However I'm sure there are some things which don't apply to "land testing", for example there is no backscatter!

What other considerations are there for playing on land vs in the water? Focal lengths? Depth of field? Focusing distances?

Does a wet lens require water in between the lens and the port to work?

Thanks!
 
Congrats on the new gear and welcome to the addiction! Try Martin Edge's book on underwater photography, 4th ed.
You might want to get familiar with the camera with no housing for a while on land. I find ruler testing to be fun and interesting. Set up a ruler with the long end facing away from your camera, with camera on a tripod for macro testing. The camera should be nearly parallel to the ruler so its shooting down the ruler then aim at the ruler markings. Shoot at near the min. focus distance on your camera. Try different aperture settings and see the depth of field in your photos via the measurements. See how much of the ruler is in focus before the focal point and after. I believe you will find of the total area in focus, 1/3 is in front of the focal point and 2/3 is behind. Its interesting and shows you what will be in focus when you shoot macro underwater.

Strobes are meant to be cooled by the water so limit the recycling shooting of the strobe in air.

For u/w testing, you might try pool testing. Get some rubber or plastic fish or other toy target subjects and weight them to sink a bit. tie them to floats with maybe 3-6 ft of string. Then toss them in a pool and you have a floating subject for testing. Try different settings, strobe positions, etc. It also can cause you to test buoyancy control while shooting. If you can control buoyancy in 5 ft of water while shooting, doing it at 30+ ft will be easy.
You can set up 2 targets at different distances away then try different apertures and focus points to see the depth of field effects.
The nice part about pool testing is your are rather safe while learning and you can worry less about boats, divers, currents, etc. My dive shop has open pool on Sunday for $10 for the whole aftn. A fun way to prepare for trips.

How is that for a few places to start?
 
Use it in the dark, or with your eyes closed.

A new camera means that you have not yet "memorized" the controls. You will tend to hunt & search and also visually confirm that your finger is about to operate the proper control.

Spend some time going through a suitable set of scenarios so that you learn the controls without the need to visually confirm the settings are correct.

If you are looking at the controls you are not looking at your subject.
 
One thing to do is put a pair of gloves on if you generally wear gloves in the water. Pushing the buttons with gloves on is different than without!
 
Hi everyone!

Well I got everything set up and here are my observations:

1) The Nauticam housing is excellent. I have not owned any other underwater housing before but it feels so natural to use; button placement and sensitivity is fantastic. I didn't have to spend time figuring anything out - once I knew how to work the camera, using the housing was a natural extension of that (on land at least!). The shutter button sensitivity is also superb. The shutter on the RX100 has a very light touch, but the housing is engineered well enough to translate that touch over to the external shutter release.

2) I've got these D1 strobes on two arms each and my goodness using this is awkward and will take some getting used to! Also to play with the strobes in some positions (e.g. spread out), I had to ***REALLY*** tighten down the clamps (scratching my nice anodized balls in the process :wink:) because the weight of the strobes just cause the arms to sag! I was concerned about this but then realised I probably won't have this issue in water.

3) Started playing with the flashes and very quickly (after about 10 shots in TTL) hit the D1's heat limits. So looks like all of my testing will have to be in the pool.

4) The whole thing is lighter than I thought it would be. I've got i-Das arms and clamps, which are amazingly light (the dealer tells me they are lighter than ultralight).

5) The cost of the accessories mounts up quickly!!!

6) Sola 1200 is great!

Thanks for all your advice guys. The floating subjects is particularly cool! I think I will need a few hours in a pool very soon.
 
Something is not adding up. I have shot my D1 strobes multiple times on land and have had NO issues with heat buildup long after 10 shots. Did you shoot them very quickly?
Bill
 
Yes, somewhat quickly - maybe 10 shots in the space of 3 minutes?

Both strobes entered heat protection mode at exactly the same time, so it looks like it's by design. If something was broken, I think it's unlikely they would manifest on both strobes in the same way (unless I just got really unlucky!).
 
I leanred something today - The strobe over heating is a new issue for me - do you have the ability to adjust the strobe power?

My old ys110's can be operated in manual mode and when turned down are capable of firing several times a second for as long as you want. Last week I was dry land testing a different manual sync cord setup in continuous camera mode. Most tests consisted of grabbing around 30 shots in a 20 second interval. I did this over a dozen times over a half hour.

I guess the strobe power setting must have a large effect. I will pay more attention to this in the future.

---------- Post added July 1st, 2013 at 08:35 PM ----------

And another tip about tightening the arms - if you can, let the arms drop below the camera. I have a sea and sea arm set with balls and so i can "invert" the arms and let the strones hang down. This is useful when testing things above water since you no longer have to support the full weight of the strobe. This means you can tighten about the same as you would for underwater.
 
S&S does not recommend rapid firing of their strobes on dry land so be a little careful with that. Here is a basic tutorial on strobe positioning. Often it is best on your first dive to pick a sport with a coral head, rock or chunk of whatever and experiment with positioning your strobes. Leave the camera settings the same but power up and down the strobes while staying in the same spot. Depending on your strobe arm setup move them to different positions to experiment with lighting and backscatter.

Here is a basic tutorial that may help. I think the biggest thing people do wrong is the farther they move away from a subject the more they point the strobe at the subject, wrong. It is counter intuitive but as you move away from the subject you can increase the power but point the strobe away from the subject....

http://opticaloceansales.com/files/OOS-Strobe-Positioning.pdf
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/peregrine/

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