Max shutter speed with a strobe?

[orangeBloke]

Yesterday I moved myself into a new realm of underwater photography by finally retiring my Oly 5060 and getting an Ikelite housing for my 350 D. All is good and I've been playing with it to see how it all works. One thing that I've quickly noticed however is that with the sync cord to my Sea&Sea YS90DX strobe (no TTL) the max shutter speed that I can get is 1/320 before I start to get a dark line across the bottom of the shot (probably the shutter closing before the strobe finishes).

Now with my old Oly this wasn't a problem as there was no mirror involved so the speed could be adjusted up to 1/2000 - which was very handy for close up subjects on a sandy background where the light gets bounced all over the place.
Does anyone know if there is a way to allow me to use a faster shutter speed without the banding appearing or is it just a case of using a good diffuser, smaller apertures, and adjusting down the strobe power to control the light?

Just curious as it'll just mean that I need to rethink how I take certain shots
Thanks

 

[OE2X]

One of the things to consider is that if you are lighting the subject just with your strobe, then it will flash somewhere between a 500th to 1000th of a second. The lower your power the the shorter the strobe will be. If you are having issues with over exposure, you should go up in f-stop, power down you strobe, diffuse the strobe or put it on a longer arm. Not sure if your camera has this feature where you can automatically underexpose by up to 2 stops. I can do so on my D2x's.

 

[alcina]

Yup, on the Canon dslr the stated max is 1/250, but as you've found 1/320 works just fine.

To get the black background now you're going to have to increase your aperture f20+ etc.

 

[orangeBloke]

Thanks to you both for the info.

The camera can bracket the flash exposure down two stops though I don't know if that'll work with the sync cord but I'll give it a try

And thanks for the advise on the black background shots Alcina, that was one of the things I was wondering how to do with the lower shutter speed