Video lights vs. strobes for uw photography

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XTAR

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I'm a Fish!
Some uw photographers tell they are switching from strobes into video lights, which is less expensive and more versatile. It’s mainly because that battery and LED technology have developed greatly. Strobe or video light, which is your choice? Some features of them below.

Key benefits of the strobe:
Strobes can produce extremely powerful bursts of light, giving more brightness and effective lighting range for uw photography. Besides, a strobe makes the photographer less noticeable to surrounding sealife. Some sea creatures are sensitive to light, and tend to shy away from bright constant light sources. It might be easy to photograph light-sensitive sea creatures using a strobe. In addition, the xenon or neon lamps used in most strobes produce a nice warm light, and high 90 CRI, which is ideal for uw photography.

Key benefits of the video light:
Video lights are versatile tools. Surely, they can be used for shooting videos, as the focus light for macro photography, capture still images, and help you to discover sea creatures in shaded areas...Besides, some video lights can produce different colors, such as white, red, blue and UV, multiple lighting modes for color compensation in UW photography.

The significant advancement in video lights’ LED system is the development of COB (Chip On Board) LEDs. A COB contains much more light sources compared to a standard LED, resulting in a greatly increased lumen output. It can also produce a wide beam angle, such as around 120°, making it suitable for wide angle cameras and lenses.

Shooting with the strobes may take more patience to fine-tune the image exposure. Shooting with video lights is much easier, but the effective shooting range can be limited. They have their own characteristics. And which type of underwater lighting setup you are using?
 
I use two Big Blue VL 4200P video lights. They work fine with my TG6
 
4300 video light with tg6

very doable

P5081056.jpg
P5081064.jpg
P5151251.jpg
 
Have the sealife dragon 3000 cold shoe mounted
The sea and sea ds2j strobe
 
Thing is video lights are great for photos but needed for video so if you also take video you need a light and also better for night dives.

Sleeping Damsels on a night dive.


 
Lion Fish and Sea Urchins night dive

 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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