Thank you to Light and Motion for participating at the Scubaboard Invasion

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cbrich

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Location
Austin
# of dives
I would like to give a big Thank You to Light and Motion (especially Amy) for coming to down to the Scubaboard Invasion. Light and Motion Amy brought a lot of gear with her; she brought plenty of Nightsea Lights, Photo Lights, and other dive lights from their line card. With them around, I could have left my dive light back home. I hope Light and Motion participates in Next Year's Invasion.

I especially like the Nightsea light, and how most of the corral had that bright green appearance (fluorescene.) If you have not dove with a Nightsea light before, you missing out on a completely different night dive. The Brain Corral lite up like a light bulb, this is something you have to experience first hand. I saw a lot of very small critters (worms mainly) that glowed orange, a very bright orange. These critters would be very hard (to impossible) to spot without the Nightsea Dive Light.

I hope several other Invaders post pictures, and videos of their Nightsea night dive.
 
Hi CBRICH !!!
So great to meet you in person. And thanks for the kind words !!

I truly had a great time getting to know all the fun and entertaining Scubaboard people! Great people & great diving = FUN !

Dennis and Roxanne....you guys ROCK !!

All the Best,
Amy
 
+1 on CBRICH's feedback. Doing what Light & Motion and Amy did is no small thing. There was expense and effort involved and Amy was a charming representative of her company. We all appreciate her efforts.

Thank you L&M for participating. Look forward to seeing you next year.
 
THANK YOU LIGHT AND MOTION!!!!! Amy it was a blast diving with you last week and hanging out!!!! :D The lights you brought were awesome!! and +2 on what cbrich said!! :D hope you see you next year or sooner!! :)
 
Definitely loved having Light and Motion at the Invasion!

Their lights are top notch. I use and love a Sola 800 focus light for both my open water and cave photography. The amount of light it puts out is downright impressive. I've stopped carrying my can light on night dives, or if I carry it, it stays off. The switch between red and white is easy and fast, making it simple to sneak up on fish.

I've found that the Sola helps speed up auto and manual focus times even in daylight. Seeing better means better pictures, I find the biggest difference is the ability to clearly see eye detail for nice and focused shots.

The Nightsea lights are way, way beyond cool. The system has several parts, which combine to make a nice light that is not single purposed. The light itself is blue LED's, not just a blue filter over LED's. This is important because LEDs produce a certain hue of light naturally, which is turned into white light thanks to filters and such built into the LED. These filters are never 100% efficient, so you lose more light with more filters. That means putting a blue filter on a white LED is actually 2 filters, which means less light. Sola Nightsea uses blue LED's which means less than the 1 filter typically found on white LEDs which means a heck of a lot of light. (note, this is a pretty simplistic explanation, and I know some of you lighting experts could explain better but...for most of us, I think my explanation is enough)

Seriously, the blue glow under the sea when people dive with this light is incredible.

The light also comes with a filter you can clip over the blue light to make it a white light. This filter takes the blue light and emits white light, which is still bright, but it's pretty diffuse. The light itself has flood and spot settings, but with the white filters, even spot is pretty diffuse. What this means is, you get a nice white light, but don't expect the same tight beam as on their pure white lights. You give up a little spot, you get an awesome flouro dive, not a bad trade off at all.

There is also some fancy coating on the glass, an "exciter" coating, which is built into the glass. It's pretty special stuff.

So, on land you see these blue glowing spots like UFO's on the reef. But if you are diving, you get these nifty barrier filters. They look like yellow plexiglas, and they are practically magic. Take it off, surrounded by blue. Put it on, the blue disappears and everything glows! (not everything, but you get the point). The lens cover is not big enough to cover the entire lens of most masks, so you do see some blue, but it's not bad. I wore mine lower on the lens since you typically look down at stuff. They include a velcro mask strap cover, you put that on around your mask strap and around the strap on the mask barrier filter, which makes it harder to lose the filter. They cost $50 each, worth it to not lose it.

For camera work, you have to get another filter for your port. I believe they have 1 for gopro, and 1 for everything else. The everything else filter just uses bungee cord. It took about 5 minutes to get it strapped on to my flat port, and it stayed put for an hour no problem.

For photography, I found it useful to use the flood on low or medium until I found something cool. With the light mounted on my camera where I usually put the focus light, as I moved in to shoot, I switched to spot mode in high power. I got the camera focused manually roughly the same spot as where the spot beam hit, and it was pretty easy to take pictures of glowing stuff.

These lights aren't cheap, but because you get a white light out of it too, it's a good option for the person who wants to see stuff glow, and dives at night fairly often. The diffuse glow would work great as a focus light, with the only downside being the lack of red light. As much as I enjoy the red light, I don't think it's that difficult to use a white light at night. However, it's difficult to put the port cover on underwater, so I'd dedicate a dive for either regular photos or flouro photos.

Of course the lights feature the same awesome Sola features--lightweight, sealed technology, charging system, etc. It just makes it easy to own a light. And, for anyone trying to justify the expense, compare the cost of C or D cell batteries for your huge dive light. Those batteries are expensive, and you want o replace them before they die because you don't want them to die underwater. That is more pollution, and more money. You open the light, and every time you do that, you have a chance to flood it. Plus, it's very heavy, and often they aren't that bright. Sola lights are tiny, practically no cost per dive, maintenance free, and bright as all get out.

Enough about their lights, how about their people? Amy and Paul were awesome! They were always around at meals, on the boat, on the beach, and they were just there to let you dive their lights. I've never met such un-pushy sales people. They were truly more interested in what you saw or photographed with their lights, than trying to sell you on them. Plus, they were underwater half the time! They were a pleasure to be around, and really showed you what their company values and the pride they put into their products. I was really surprised to learn that really, they make it all here. The batteries are imported, but the bodies and bezels? Machined and molded in their factory. Very cool.

I can't wait for next year's Invasion, and I hope that Light and Motion will come back next year!

Nudibranch-0308.jpgFlouro-0315.jpgFlouro-0267.jpg
 

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