Comments on: Seeing the Light

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:32:57 +0000

Alex: If you buy a housing for your D700, many of the housings have built-in capability to use fibre-optic cables to trigger strobes. If you want to trigger a YS-27 with a D700, it should work with the housings from Zillion, Nauticam, and Sea & Sea. Perhaps others too, especially those from Japan.

To clarify a bit, you don’t need a special LED. The built-in flash for the D700 will work fine as a trigger via fibre

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:39:22 +0000

Hi Tony,

Really interesting article ! I am so glad I found someone with the same problematics as me…
Ok, I am not playing in the same court, I haven’t yet bought an underwater housing for my D700, so I am still playing around with my Ricoh P&S.
I’ll skip the details, but for some complicated reason, I unfortunately cannot use the pop-up flash on the camera. And since I wanted to use a YS-27 strobe with the optical cables, I am not stuck
So I started to look around for a solution similar to what carlos was suggesting: the tiniest flash power a bright LED to trigger the strobe, but I have been unsuccessful finding that or the proper instruction to build it…
So when I read that you built your own electrical to optical converter… I felt really interested

Alex

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:25:35 +0000

Hi Carlos,

That’s excellent news!

I’ve used the YS27 before with compact cameras and I like the strobe a lot.

Enjoy your new set up! I hope you get lots of terrific photos.

Cheers,

Tony

By: Carlos

Carlos — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:39:26 +0000

Hi,
I didn’t try with a D300, but using the D90 in a Nauticam and a small Sea&Sea YS27 strobe connected with fiber optic for macro was a pleasure. Very compact and easy to handle rig. The fiber optic connection worked very well, even with $1 home made cable.

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:43:53 +0000

Hi Carlos,

Great. Good luck, and please let me know what happens!

Cheers,

Tony

By: Carlos

Carlos — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:36:57 +0000

I´ll try with a D300 this weekend and see if they are quicker recicling. But I am afraid that battery is the same and the buit in flash too…

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:34:24 +0000

Hi Carlos,

Ok good luck. If you know someone with a D700, D300, etc., it might be worth testing to see if those cameras give you better flash recycle performance. Wish I could tell you more, but I haven’t used the cameras enough to know how they’d perform

Cheers,

Tony

By: Carlos

Carlos — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:27:13 +0000

Hi Tony,
I agree with you fiber optic can be so much more convenient than sync cords (until we get real wireless sync).
Yes, I can turn down power to 1/128. But even in that low power setting after 3-4 quick shots the camera needs about 10 seconds to recicle. It’s not a situation you find very often, but if it happens in a special occasion, like an unusual animal behaviour, or quick action dive it can become very frustrating. I have to figure out how to make one of those optic converters with a self powered LED, so it doesn’t drain camera’s power. Inon used to have a device to do that externally. It would connect to the housing’s bulkhead and emit a light that fiber optic could transmit to strobes. But I want it to be inside of the housing, attached to the camera’s hot-shoe.
Electronically it should be very simple, the smallest, simplest, least powered flash would do the work. I´ll keep looking.
Bye, bye,

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:14:37 +0000

Hi Carlos,

My Zillion housings use an LED circuit. I’ve been using this type of set up for something like 5 years. Haven’t touched a sync cord since I started using optical triggers. I’m not a Nikon user, but can’t you turn down the strobe to manual power at something like 1/128? I tried with the Nauticam 7D housing and turned down the power on my 7D. Had no problem repeat firing. I forgot what I set the strobe power to, but it was low.

Cheers,

Tony

By: Carlos

Carlos — Thu, 13 May 2010 02:00:35 +0000

I wonder if there has been any progress in this field. I want to use fiber optic with a Nikon D90 in a Nauticam housing, which is easy using the built in camera flash. But I found that after some quick shots the built in flash needs some time to recycle, even if it is set to the minimum manual power. So, a tiny LED light fed with a small battery and triggered by the camera hot shoe would be ideal to send the signal to the strobes, working in manual. Is this so difficult to achieve? How about a LED connected directly to the camera’s hot-shoe with a battery in series connection? or will this fry the camera’s circuit?