sekhmet wrote:Ok, I'm an idiot, I'll admit it right up front. I had a 960 strobe from Sealife and I really liked it. I went to Bonaire and took about 400 pictures with it. Hurrah. There were some nice German divers there and they really liked my strobe but it would have cost them about $600 in Germany so in the interest of international relations and to prove that not all americans are jerks , I sold it to them for what I paid- $300.
Fast forward to about 2 weeks ago when I treated myself to a new strobe- the 960D- and happily went out to take pictures. Guess what I have- all white pictures. ugh!
Yes, I have a variable flash and it didn't seem to matter... the strobe also has an auto setting which also didn't seem to matter. I have a canon 710 IS.
Does anyone have advice? Thanks in advance!
Hi Laura (?),
The good news, if your photo's are all white then your flash is timing correctly.
The bad news, you're going to have to manually adjust a bunch of stuff.
I am unfamiliar with your equipment and tropical diving, but try this for a NW dive.
Rig changes:
put the diffuser that came with your camera on... but cover it with duct tape... this will push the light from the subject area to the sides (e.g. where the slave sensor on your strobe is)...
Stand in front of a mirror and fire that baby... look at the photo, their should be light coming from the strobe and the rim of the diffuser.
basically, you don't want any of the light coming from your internal flash to hit the subject, yet it HAS to hit the slave sensor for the strobe to fire.... many people solve this with a fibre optic cable...
you are decidedly out of the world of "auto" anything
Settings:
Set your camera to M (manual)
Set the aperture to 5.6
Set the Shutter speed to 1/125
Set the ISO to 100
Set the photo quality to max
Set the internal flash to it's lowest output (1 above "off"), keep all the other settings the same.
take some macro shots out of water... change the aperture and shutter speed dependent on the effect your going for accordingly... to get the whole subject in focus in macro, use the highest setting (maybe f-8 on that camera)...
As your shooting, look at the photo's in playback, have a look at the histogram of the shot... you're going for a centered "camels hump" shape for a well exposed image... when the peaks of the histogram are mostly on the left you're underexposed, on the right and you're over exposed... over exposure is way harder to compensate for as it sounds like you've already found out.
Let me know how it works,
Scott
