Viability of using Sola lights exclusively, instead of a strobe?

[jlr]

Hi everyone,
I'm a hobbyist underwater photographer, and previously was using an Olympus E-PL5 with a basic Sea&Sea fiber optic strobe and a Light&Motion Sola light. I've just upgraded to an E-M5II camera.

On my new camera rig, I'm considering ditching my strobe entirely, and instead adding a second Sola light. This would give me two 1200 lumen floods on either side of the camera.

Would you consider this a viable option? Or is a strobe really still essential?

Most of my picture taking would be in clear tropical areas, though I will likely be doing a mix of wide angle, macro, and night. The motivation to ditching the strobe is to reduce bulk and weight and simplify the rig (no TTL or flash settings, etc).

I'd appreciate any feedback! Thanks!

 

[tbone1004]

Jill Heinerth just had a blog post about using video lights instead of a strobe. I wouldn't think two 1200's are enough though... If you're serious about it, the UWLD-60V is the best one out there and now with the stack caps you can have two heads on the same canister.

 

[tursiops]

I've got an EM10, and have tried both strobes and video lights for still pictures. The strobes are far superior in terms of image quality; much more light, and short exposures (the strobe only flashes for maybe 1/10000 of a sec) for stop action. With your EM5II you are in the no-compromise zone for the camera. Why go backwards for the lighting? Trigger the strobes optically, forget TTL, get used to running the system manually. It really isn't that hard, and you get immediate feedback during the learning process.

 

[backscatter_rob]

Using video lights in place of strobes is becoming more and more common. If this is the direction you are wanting to go, you need to understand the limitations of a video light over a strobe. A strobe is many, many times more powerful than even a very powerful video light allowing you to use much more suitable camera settings to achieve a good exposure. Another thing to also keep in mind is where there is more ambient light (tropics), you need more artificial light to compensate. The SOLA 1200s will be ok for very close up or macro work where ambient light isn't so much of a factor, but get into a wide angle scene and the 1200s wont be enough. I would recommend keeping the strobes. Overall they will give you the best performance from wide all the way down to macro. It was mentioned above, take control of all aspects of the image from the camera settings and your strobes. To me this makes the image that much more special since you made the final decision on what the image looks like, instead of relying on the camera to make that decision for you.