can i use a strobe like ikelite ds51 as regular flash with a dslr without housing?

[breadbin]

hi, i need to get a flash for my pentax k10d to do some macro photography and was thinking of a regular pentax af360fgz flash and it occurred to me that i also need a strobe for my two ikelite housings for underwater work i have both an oly 8080 and 5050 and housings. could i buy a strobe for these lets say the ikelite ds51 and somehow use it as a regular flash for my K10d. i have the tray and arm for the housings already which i can use with the dslr.

the way i would hope it would work is that there is a wire in the housing that connects the hotshoe of the olympus to the housing bulkhead, now if i remove this from the housing or preferably buy a spare wire, could i connect the sync cord of the ds51 to this and thus to the hotshoe so that the TTL works? i just realised that the hotshoe for the k10d is different to the cable in the housing is there any other way or am i stuck to buying separate flashes for both underwater and ground lighting? thanks - ed

 

[bvanant]

There is no "easy" way to do this. If you have an underwater strobe it will want either a Nikonos type sync cord. You would need to buy both the hot shoe adapter and the sync cord and whatever TTL converter that you would need for the K10. Not trivial at all.
Bill

 

[Searcaigh]

Not familiar with your strobe, but if it has a slave function you could fire it using the built in camera flash, TTL might not work of course so need to experiment with aperture - just a thought

 

[gert7to3]

There is a manual (slave) strobe controller available from Ikelite for their strobes. The controller comes with one cable and it has another port for an additional cable, should you need to control two Ike strobes. The controller will cost around $120.00. Such a system would be somewhat bulky. You would have to use the Pentax camera's internal strobe to trigger the Ike strobe(s), but the controller would permit you to adjust your strobe(s) intensity.

Manual Strobe Controller

I have a DS-51 which I use with this controller. Sort of got forced into this by Ike when they didn't evolve their housing line to handle micro 4/3rds cameras.

 

[breadbin]

There is no "easy" way to do this. If you have an underwater strobe it will want either a Nikonos type sync cord. You would need to buy both the hot shoe adapter and the sync cord and whatever TTL converter that you would need for the K10. Not trivial at all.
Bill

thanks for the replies, yeah it was gonna be messy and i suppose could be a bit of a headache trying to get it to work so i went out and got a dedicated flash for the k10d. i will get a dedicated strobe for the ikelite too in the near future. i suppose i just need something that works without any messing especially underwater. its hard enough to take pictures without any compromising!

 

[DazedAndConfuzed]

you probably have to see which of the lead from the DS51, when shorted to ground, will fire itself off, then run 2 wires from it to the hot shoe of the camera's basic external flash trigger. If it has a PC port, then make some doo-dad to hook up to that.