AUTiger:
I find the two sides facing off to be amusing. The manual control folks say that TTL may sometimes fail and you will miss those once in a lifetime photos.
At the opposite extreme, they say that the digital camera has instant review, so you can shoot, examine, adjust, and reshoot. Sounds to me like you just missed that once in a lifetime photo when you had to adjust and reshoot.
There are pros and cons to both sides. Try one for a while and then switch sides if you wish. If you wish, try whichever side is less expensive first.
David
Actually it was the TTL user that said it could fail:
“Or join the 21st century and use TTL. It works fine for most of your shooting. It can be fooled, just as it can on land, but these are a minority of the time.”
The advantage of shooting in manual strobe control, which is its really semi auto mode, is that with the camera set at aperture priority, one of the variables is removed.
And that variable is the light intensity from the strobe, the intensity is fixed, you control the amount of light hitting the CCD sensor via the aperture opening, the background is controlled by a varying shutter speed, controlled by the camera’s exposure meter. The shutter speed is meant to “float” or adjust the background depending on the “manual” opening of the aperture.
The advantage to this is that you have a known or predetermine range of strobe exposure control. Meaning that at a give range (less than one or two feet or more) you know exactly what the exposure will be at a given distance, because the strobe power is fixed. I would just push or pull the entire rig (camera and strobe) into a known range and fire.
And this is where it gets hairy…
With TTL strobe control in film cameras (Digital PS cameras do not have TTL strobe control) the light intensity of the strobe is variable depending on what the camera’s electronics is telling the strobe.
The camera’s working end of the TTL system is a photo sensor mounted inside the camera looking at the center of the actual film plane itself. The electronics is programmed to make this area 18% of gray meaning that a white object should be light gray and a black or dark object should also be gray. So now, even if the TTL system is working as it should, we have the white or light colored objects UNDER exposed and the darker objects OVER exposed!
And it does not stop there! Remember that in a TTL system the camera only cares about the area in the center of the film. So what if the subject does not occupy this center area of the film, like that fast moving once in a lifetime subject? You guess it, that subject was just blown out to the overexposed ROUNDFILE, because now the camera thinks that the subject is much farther way than it really is and is now telling the strobe to pump out more power!
Let's fast forward to the digital age...TTL strobe control does not work with PS digital cameras because the CCD sensor cannot reflect the light to the photo TTL sensor as it did with film. So what does the camera maker do? Mount a photo sensor OUTSIDE the camera just above the lens, now the light hitting the outside sensor may or may not be the same intensity as the light hitting the CCD sensor inside the camera.
And to make matters worse we place the camera in an underwater housing so even if we cover most of the internal flash, some light still escapes, bounces off the housing and back to the photo sensor and telling the system to shut off the flash power even before the image is fully exposed. using the hotshoe for an Olympus strobe will help but the housing may now be blocking the out sensor and not blocking the CCD sensor inside the camera.
Well now you can say that one can always adjust the exposure compensation on the manual controller or on the cameras buttons…well I could have done that as well in manual mode, at less the cost! Plus you had better be sure that manual controller is pointed at your subject because if the controller does not see what the camera's lens sees, distance wise, the exposure could be over or underexposed. Because the manual controller is NOT a TTL (Through The Lens) system.
In conclusion we really have an auto exposure system that tells YOU how to shoot, your subjects better be in the center of your viewfinder or else! So much for that "artsy" off center subject stuff I guess thats why they call it a "slave"
As c-8080 has problems focusing in low light conditions I'm getting one with a focus light. Did you find a list of supported strobes from mike-dive? My german isn't good enough or they didn't have a list available on their website. Now I'm leaning towards inon z-240 for it's high power/guide number, fast recycling time and guide light. There's also sea&sea ys110 that meets my requirements. Other than those (maybe inon z-220 but it's discontinued) I haven't quite found any goodies. Have you tried digital Diver (
