There’s always a measure of satisfaction when you finally solve a puzzle, particularly when that puzzle is something you’ve lived with for a long time.

You experience a moment of “Eureka!” followed by a deep sigh of release, as years of pent-up frustration at not knowing the answer finally dissipate. Yesterday was such a day.

Fair warning: This is a somewhat dry technical discussion, so if you read on, you run the risk of being bored to tears. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Background
I use Zillion housings. I use fibre-optic cables to trigger Inon strobes, mainly my Z220 strobes, though I own Z240s and have recently acquired an S2000.

I really like this combination, because: Everything’s light (Zillion housings are ABS plastic, Inon strobes are compact); The strobes run on universally available AA batteries; I use rechargeable NiMH batteries for maximum efficiency and minimal environmental impact; I’m in Japan a lot, so it’s easy to get parts and servicing; Fibre-optic cables are a helluva lot lighter than sync cords, and they don’t flood.

Most people who use fibre-optic cables use them with cameras that have built-in, pop-up strobes. Inon circuitry allows for the light from the internal strobe to control the external strobes, making it possible to use the native camera intelligence to control strobe output…hence terms like S-TTL and even wireless S-TTL…meaning you can just point and shoot without worrying about the strobes too much.

The problem is that I use cameras without pop-up strobes. Specifically, I’ve used the Canon 1D and 5D series, most recently the Canon 5D Mark II.

With no pop-up strobe, you need to get creative to use a fibre-optic connection, because fibre transmits optical signals (i.e., light), not electrical signals (which is what your camera sends out via the hotshoe).

The Work Around
So for several years, I’ve been using a work-around. Inside the Zillion housings I use is a clever proprietary mechanism that converts electrical input to optical output.

The result? I can fire my strobes via fibre-optics, even though I’m using cameras without built-in strobes.

The immediate drawback is that I can’t shoot with any simulated TTL function, but that’s not an issue for me, since I shoot everything under manual control.

The second, less obvious challenge, is that something funky happens in the electrical-to-optical conversion process, causing the strobes to misfire.

I discovered this with the first Zillion housing I used, with my Canon 1Ds Mark II. I got the housing two days before leaving for a month-long trip, and upon testing, discovered that every photo turned out black, or too dark relative to what it should be.

After a bit of screaming, running around in circles and calling people at random to plead for emergency assistance, a work-around materialised in the form of an extra part, called a Focus Light Controller (FLC), from Inon.

As I understand, this gadget was designed by Inon for use with Inon housings to stop activation of the focus light on their strobes, so it wasn’t designed to deal with the issue I was facing at the time, and it’s not even marketed by Inon (it’s not on their website).

But, the FLC happens to cancel all pre-flash signals, so…on the (untested and unproven) theory that the problem I was facing was due to pre-flash signals, I invested (about US$450!) in a bunch of these FLCs and hoped for the best. I was desperate.

They arrived via courier the day before my departure. I tried them. They worked.

So I’ve made do with this work-around ever since. As far as I know, I’m the only person to use this unusual configuration. (If you’re wondering what other people who use the same cameras, housings and strobes do…so am I. There’s no way they’re getting proper light output.)

Fast Forward
As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Following this age-old wisdom, I continued using this work-around successfully with my Canon 5D cameras, and I assumed that the same solution would work with my new Canon 5D Mark II camera when I travelled to Izu recently.

Oops.

I didn’t have time to test everything before departing, so it wasn’t until I was on location that I discovered…nothing worked. At all. Excellent timing. *$@(%!(!#!!!

Anyway, with quite a bit of lost sleep and muttering under my breath, I managed to finagle around the problem and get decent photos, but it wasn’t fun, and the circumstances were far from ideal.

So, once I got back to Tokyo, I set about trying to figure this out once and for all, with the help of Nagamatsu-san from Aquaforum and Kojima-san, the owner of Zillion.

The Resolution
I’ll spare you the details of the many agonising tests, discussions and disagreements we had, but after a few weeks of back-and-forth, we finally figured it out yesterday.

In short, the conversion from electrical-to-optical requires a power source. Not a big power source, but just enough to kick the optical signal along. The design used in the Zillion housing draws power from the camera’s battery. Since not a lot of power is required, it never affected the camera’s performance.

What we discovered, however, is that the route through which the power was derived has an unexpected side-effect.

The Zillion conversion process takes power via the remote-release socket on the left side of the camera (when viewed from the rear). In the process of testing, we stumbled upon the fact that under certain instances, the camera outputs an electrical signal via that socket.

This unanticipated electrical output sent an unanticipated “fire!” signal to the external strobes via the fibre-optic cables, resulting in mis-firing/ mis-timing.

The FLC work-around I used worked because the FLC (mis)interpreted this “fire!” signal as a pre-flash and stopped it.

So we had an unintentional signal being stopped unintentionally, producing the desired result. Who says double negatives don’t not work?

(Actually, there was an additional minor, unrelated issue that further complicated the situation, so in reality, we had an unintentional signal being stopped unintentionally before it was able to be stopped unintentionally, producing…a mess.)

In hindsight, this makes sense. But for the past several years, no one ever thought of this (at least, not that I’m aware of). We’re not certain what the electrical signal is for, but I surmise that the electrical output is from the camera back to the remote release to let the remote release know whether the camera is focused or not.

Solution
So, now that we finally know the root of the problem, we have several possible solutions to test. Fortunately, for my upcoming trip to Tonga, I won’t need strobes, so there’s time to re-configure the conversion circuitry to fix the problem.

This situation doesn’t affect a lot of people outside Japan, but if (a) you have a Zillion 5D or 5D Mark II housing, (b) you use fibre-optic cables instead of traditional sync cords and (c) you are using Z220 strobes, you will have a problem and need to contact me or Zillion.

For later series strobes, including the Z240, D2000, S2000 series, there may be an issue, but you can minimise the impact by ensuring that the magnet button on the right lower side of your strobe is in the “up” position in the case of the Z240, and that you do not have the magnets installed in the case of the 2000-series strobes.

Remember, this only applies if you’re using fibre, and if you use a Canon DSLR that does not have a pop-up strobe, in a Zillion housing. (In other words, don’t panic and flood me with emails.)

When we have out a permanent solution, I’ll post again.

Aside
If you’ve attended any of my talks or been on trips with me, you know that one of the things I keep emphasising is that obsessing over the exact camera settings you use isn’t a good idea.

This is a perfect example.

Had I been locked into a specific, tried-and-true, always-use set of camera settings, I would have never succeeded in getting the squid shots in Izu. As it was, I understood that there was insufficient light coming from my strobes, so I fiddled to get the appropriate ambient light exposure and minimised the requirement from my strobes.

In fact, I had no idea what the settings were until after I came up, downloaded the files and looked at the metadata in Aperture.

And finally…my heartfelt thanks to Nagamatsu-san and Kojima-san for spending the time and having the patience to slog through this time-consuming, tedious testing process!

Oops. I meant to talk a bit about image-processing work flow in my last post, but forgot. I must’ve been too preoccupied constructing my sophisticated photo-shoot schematic.

Anyway, I hit a bit of an obstacle after getting back from my first day with the Canon 5D Mark II. After downloading my files and making two complete copies, I dragged a random RAW file over to my desktop, with the objective of opening it in Photoshop to see how I did.

Fail. Big time.

You see, every time Adobe releases a major upgrade of Photoshop and related software, the company has the charming habit of ensuring that the previously perfectly good version of their software doesn’t get updated to work with RAW formats from new cameras as they’re released.

Being armed only with Photoshop CS3, I couldn’t open the 5D Mark II RAW file…at least not with Adobe software.

There is a workaround. You can convert RAW format to Adobe’s DNG format, and then open with previous versions of Photoshop, but who the &*#$(@ wants to do that?

Otherwise, you need to invest in new software, which of course makes sense from Adobe’s point of view, but doesn’t really from mine, since I only use a handful of really basic functions in Photoshop, none of which have changed substantially in any iteration of the software I’ve had.

To solve the problem, I brought everything into Aperture (which I normally do anyway, but I was just in a hurry in this case to see how my first photos turned out). I sorted, tagged and picked a few favourites out of the day’s shots. Perfect.

Then, I experienced my next obstacle with Aperture’s RAW conversion. The RAW converter does an OK job, but the results from Aperture’s conversion process for underwater images, especially those involving lots of blue, aren’t as good as they could be. For topside photos and macro stuff, Aperture does just fine, but with blue water in the background…not so much to my liking.

Anyway, the work-around was to use Canon’s proprietary RAW conversion engine, built into its Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software, which comes packaged with Canon DSLRs.

The software is slow and clunky, but the RAW converter is by far the best for Canon files…which makes sense if you stop to think about it.

DPP gives you control over quite a few things, the most useful of which I’ve found to be Picture Style (Canon’s proprietary colour-management profiles), exposure and light temperature. There’s also a chromatic aberration correction function, which can help quite a bit if you’ve got a file with noticeable colour shift. I pretty much don’t touch all the other controls.

And of course, transferring from DPP to Photoshop CS3 was no problem, producing beautiful files and obviating my inability to convert 5D Mark II RAW files with CS3.

Yes, this process takes longer and is more cumbersome that a straight Aperture-based conversion, or opening with CS4 RAW Converter, but I believe it results in the highest-quality files, and the fact that I don’t need to buy CS4 is a big bonus too. I only converted the files I really liked, and left all the others alone (i.e., this more troublesome process makes me edit more harshly, which is a good thing).

Finally, I had my first real-life chance to make use of the MarineLife Keywords List I wrote about a while ago.

All I had to do to label my squid shots was look-up “bigfin reef squid” in the MarineLife Keywords index that I had already imported into Aperture, and, like magic, I had everything I needed in order to tag the squid images:

bigfin reef squid: Sepioteuthis lessoniana; bigfin squid: Sepioteuthis lessoniana; Cephalopods: Cephalopoda; Invertebrates; Loliginidae; Mollusks: Mollusca; Squid: Teuthida; Teuthoidea

…in practical terms, meaning I didn’t have to (mis)type all those long multi-syllabic tongue-twisters into each photo’s metadata. All I had to do was drag-and-drop the list onto all my squid files and I was done!

So to summarise, my work flow for the 5D Mark II:

- Import into Aperture; delete junk so no one else sees cruddy images;
- Tag with MarineLife Keywords; add location tags (Note: Save $5 off MarineLife Keywords with discount code I692W094 at checkout);
- Use Aperture’s Smart Albums to pick out favourite images;
- Open selected file with Canon DPP; adjust; send to Photoshop CS3;
- Make final minor adjustments; save as required format.

Using a new camera and housing for the first time is always a bit nerve-wracking…all the more so when you’ve got limited time, a fever, bad weather, and skittish animals…as I did in Izu.

Plus, just to add to my anxiety, a bunch of people were expecting me to get good photos, none of them allowing for the (entirely realistic) possibility that I could flub up and botch the whole trip.

Just days before my departure, I got a Canon 5D Mark II, the successor to my favourite camera for the past several years, the original EOS 5D.

Yes, I know. The camera has been out a while, but there wasn’t much point for me to invest in one until I had a housing for it…so as soon as I had a Zillion 5D Mark II housing in my eager hands, I got the camera and headed to Izu.

There’s been so much written about the 5D Mark II that I’m not going to bother talking about specs and such. Just Google the camera name and you’ll find plenty of technical information about it.

I am, however, going to tell you that after four dives with the camera…I love it. Here’s why:

By way of background, I’ve used a number of Canon DSLRs over the past several years, including the 1D, 1Ds, 1D Mark II, 1Ds Mark II, 1D Mark III, 5D, and 40D. Of all those cameras, the 5D was my favourite.

It’s the right size for my hands, so I don’t get as tired carrying a couple of them around all day as I do with the larger 1D cameras, and the colour rendition seems the nicest of all the Canon cameras I’ve used…at least to my eye.

Also, I’m a simple shooter, meaning I stick to the basics…i.e., as long as I have control over shutter, aperture and ISO, I’m happy. I don’t fiddle too much (especially underwater) with the options and additional functionality available on DSLRs, so the 5D was perfect for my needs.

With this in mind, I had high expectations for the 5D Mark II.

The camera didn’t disappoint. As you can see from the photo at the top of this post and from my earlier post about the squid I photographed in Izu, the colour rendition of the 5D Mark II is outstanding.

I shot the squid image above at ISO 320, with the aperture pretty wide at f5.6, shutter set at 1/200, and illumination for the squid from two Inon Z220s set far to the left and right, pointed nearly straight out. I was using a Canon 17-40mm lens, zoomed in close to the 40mm end, with a Pro-One Dome and a +2 diopter.

Why did I choose these settings? Well, in short, because I had to. It was pretty dark, so I needed to use a relatively high ISO to pick up ambient light, but also, my strobes were mis-firing and not putting out enough juice.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the strobes to work properly, so I needed the extra camera sensitivity to be able to wrap sufficient light around the squid. (I think I’ve figured out the cause of the strobe difficulties. I’ll write about it later once I can confirm.)

To say that I was worried about how the images would turn out is like saying I was sorta nervous on my first date!

Fortunately, the camera performed beautifully. Despite the relatively high ISO (I usually prefer to stick to ISO 100, or up to 200 max), the noise levels were fine. I’m not a pixel-peeper, so my criterion was viewing the files at 100% on-screen and checking for ugly stuff.

Despite the difficult lighting situation, the camera did a great job distinguishing the nuances in light levels to make the squid look 3-D and not flat (as they appear in many photographs I’ve seen of them).

If I had one gripe, it’s with the autofocus. The reason I switched from Nikon to Canon many years ago was Canon’s superior AF on the long lenses I use topside. Underwater, in dark conditions, Canon AF doesn’t work as well as I’d like.

Obviously, the AF is good enough for me to get the photos I need, but it just seems to be less zippy than it should be…primarily in low EV conditions and with macro subjects. This was true with the 5D, and it doesn’t seem to have improved any in the 5D Mark II.

Again, I’m not a technical expert…I just know what I experience.

From what I hear from friends, the recent Nikon DSLRs have excellent AF, so I’m looking for an excuse and the circumstances to try a Nikon D700 underwater…[insert sound of me clearing my throat]…a not-too-subtle hint to anyone who might be in a position and of the inclination to send a camera my way!

But, the minor AF issue aside, the bottom line is that I’m happy enough with the camera that I’ll be getting a second 5D Mark II body soon, which I’ll be putting to work in a Seacam 5D housing that I’ll have my hands on shortly…[insert video clip of me rubbing my hands together in anticipatory, lustful manner].