My new toys for underwater photography"

So, I've been quite busy these past 6 months. First I was in the Navy, and now I am at the norwegian maritime museum. Which has given me a more nuanced view of many things, among them being maritime archaeology. more of that later.

Whats cool is that I have recently gotten some UW-photo guff! the last year I have been pretty annoyed by the fact that simply stuffing my P&S nikon coolpics into an underwater housing posed serious limits on me when trying to get decent pics in a dark and cold enviroment. the main challange has been the lak of usable natural light and the uselessness of the built-in flash on the compact digital camera. At work I got to use a D300 in a Subal UW-housing with a seriously huge fisheye, which instantly made just about everything into Fine Art Prints.

Well, the toys have I have gotten should hopefully help. I got a UltraMax UltraPower UXDS-1 Strobe, a Fantasea M46 Fisheye and some other stuff'n'guff. The flash is extremly simple and seemingly well-built.

U got 4 switches: magnetic on/off, Test (simply fires the strobe), power (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) and a pre-flash setting. thats it, and for small point and shoots, I am hopefull that it's all I'll need.

The button for poweroutput is self-explanatory, and once u have held the strobe, so is the pre-flash button. you simply push it to set the apropriate ammount of pre-flashes that your camera uses. Everything from 0-4. one push = 1 pre-flash, 2 push = 2 pre-flash and so on. the strobe remembers the settings once you have done it, but if the need to fix it underwater should present itself, it will require the technical comprehension level of a semi-retarded neanderthal to fix it in less than 2 seconds.

The flash uses two light-sensors on its underside to dedtect when your cameras integrated strobe goes off (one on each side for maximum coverage. So in theory, you can simply bring it with you as a handheld to be able to use it). But the cool thing is that they decided to include a fiber-optical syncronization cable with the strobe. the sync-cord comes in a neat little kit with alll you need. a small patch that slides under the rubber-covering to blind the sensor you're not using, and a similar patch with the cord attached to it to fit likewise to the ohter sensor. the end meant for your camerahousing is attached to some M3 plastic velcro (comes with spares, just in case) so that you can easily take it on and off as you wish. the specs aren't overly impressive, but it sure as hell offers some great bang for the bucks.
The strobe is powered by 4 AA batteries that sit in a separate compartment (protected by double o-rings).

I haven't actually gotten to use the strobe yet, but I'll do so in the weekend or on monday so that I write a review of it (mostly to gather my own thoughts on the product)

The Fantasea M46 fisheye also looks to be of simple well-made quality, but I am a bit more sceptical regarding the efficiency of it as it's considerably less curved than all other fish-eyes I've ever tried (not that I have any clue on what I'm talking about).
The first and most prominent potential problem i am aware of is that even though the Fantasea housing is made specifically for my camera, the camera lens sits at the top of the lens of the housing, whereas the centre of the fisheye is matched to that of the housing. What it means is that the fisheye will possibly distribute light unevenly to the cameralens, thereby creating some unwanted distribution of light and warping of the image. but we'll see. The second problem I encountered was that the lens (the part u can get a grip on when attaching or un-screwing) rotates independantly of the threads. so if you attach the lens with more than the absolute minimum of rotation, it might get seriously stuck onto the housing (thereby ruining all future hopes of nice macro-footage).

but again: we'll see how it works in real actual factual water. I'll write a review for the lens too.