Strobes and focus help

[RDRINK25]

I have a Canon T21 w/ Sea and Sea housing, 2 YS-01's and a new Sola 1200 Photo. I am leaving to go to the Galapagos and will not have time to play with the strobes and focus light before I go. Looking for sugestions on settings. How should I use the Sola with the strobes? Should I be using the red setting and at what power? I will have the strobes in TTL so I will probably start off at half power. Any help appreciated!

 

[bvanant]

The sola is a great focus light. I use mine (not in red mode) with the strobes. The strobe power is such that you will not notice the sola in the photo for the most part. If you are shooting big stuff (like hammerheads), I would shoot in manual mode and at full power for the YS01.
Bill

 

[RDRINK25]

The sola is a great focus light. I use mine (not in red mode) with the strobes. The strobe power is such that you will not notice the sola in the photo for the most part. If you are shooting big stuff (like hammerheads), I would shoot in manual mode and at full power for the YS01.
Bill

What about the Sola? Should that be full as well?

 

[Searcaigh]

I use a Sola with my DSLR, albeit for manual focus, but have never used or required full power. Just use the lowest setting and see how it works with your own rig and up the power if required.

 

[Interceptor121]

The lowest setting of 300 lumens is plenty to have your camera focus
If you use the red light you might need to pump it up a bit as I believe the lowest setting is 75 lumens that is indeed too little
The intermediate is 250 and the highest is 300
I would check how you get on with 250 as that gives you more battery

 

[nudibranco]

I have a Sola 600 (and many have the Sola focus light) and I have been using the red setup sometimes. But I am not so convinced it is of great help in preventing critters from running away.

Instead I see that at F11 and 1/250 (my typical setting for MACRO shooting on the OM-D) some red light does indeed tint of red at medium and max Sola setting the picture.
You will not see much of this with the strobe(s) on but indeed some red channel seems to be further saturated by this light. If you use WB auto it may overcome this somewhat so this would be a good setting to use I think.

It will not be much of an effect in most situation but since I see my macro shots I bit too reddish I am not using the red light anymore (and it did not seem to keep critters more relaxed anyway...). So from now on, on the Sola, I am using the regular 5500K white light setting and the mid or low setting for MACRO or close shots.

Just my thoughts and experience I decided to pass through and to hear some comments and suggestions...

 

[Interceptor121]

Even if you are colour blind light is light so the critter will see something, less annoying but still something in the end?

 

[mjh]

Spent two weeks in Galapagos and have been to Cocos twice, very similar. In general your 01 strobes will only light up subjects at most 10-12ft away. Backscatter can be a big challenge in this area. Most of the time I shot natural light with camera in Manual. Shooting high ISOs, greater than ISO400, will help. In this case your focus light is fairly useless. I found being able to move the "Focus Point" around useful as the camera/lens often has trouble grabbing focus on gray subjects in dark situations.

Your strobes will work for general shooting and the occasional close pass. You can see some of our attempts at our site Aquablue Dreams for Videos check the Multimedia section, never could get the video section to work, lol.