Hello!
Here am I back from the Rea Sea, with pictures from my Nimar 303D housing with Canon EOS400D.
First a little general remark; beware when you buy sync cords! I bought mine on the internet, based on the pictures of the connectors I needed. Well, standard Nikonos and Sea & Sea strobe connectors are not exactly the same ones, with a screw a few fractions of mm smaller on the Nikonos, so I was in trouble, 48h before leaving! I was lucky enough to have an underwater photography shop on my way to the airport, so I could figure out a solution there.
We actually noticed that you *COULD* open the internal strobe (contrary to what I wrote earlier in this same topic), so you can in theory use an optic slave cord, and thus S-TTL…. In reality it doesn’t work that well, with a VERY poor strobe fire rate (below 1/20) underwater, for reasons really unclear to me. So next time I take this housing underwater I will get myself a real sync cord, getting stuck in manual modes (which was the case anyway, as I got no more than 2-3 S-TTL flashes during out-of-water tests….).
Another problem with this housing is its weight; it’s strongly positively buoyant, and nearly endangered me on a wreck dive with a strong current, as it kept zooming up and hitting my mask and unbalancing me, even though I had put a 500g leader balls pouch in the housing; so I had to add a 1kg belt weight that conveniently fitted in the wide space on the right of the camera, and then (with 1,5kg) I had a confortably, slightly negatively buoyant camera. So you can solve this, but your plane company won’t like it.
Another problem I had (and it’s the second housing out of two that gives me this kind of problem) is that pressure tends to push buttons on its own, causing bad control for the camera; especially when the depressed button is the one changing the function of the setting wheel from “exposure time” to “aperture”..... Luckily enough, the remaining function was “aperture”, thus allowing me to make settings for the anyway unusable strobe.
But apart from these problem all related to bad luck and compatibility (except for the last one; is there something to do about this?), I got pretty good pictures, especially when I used a personnal white balance using the picture of a slate; the pictures even look like there is no water, which is a bit awkward I think!
So here are some pictures from my dives, looking forward for your feed back, advices and comments.
