Dave’s Blog2 (10JAN23)

Hello again to my blog. This second blog leans a little towards the customization and technical side. In terms of risk and potential disaster, I mean you could ruin your equipment with one wrong move kind of disaster it is equivalent to a category 5 hurricane. So here is a WARNING – don’t do this at home!

A few months ago a friend approached me with a wager. It was a kind of wager one does with friends when inebriated with a few beverages. The challenge was to make an existing underwater housing fitted with wire sync bulkheads to work with an optical slave strobe like an Inon strobe for example. Two strobes in fact – as bravado clearly took the better of me.

A week later and the results…..?

Take a perfectly innocent looking Patima 400/450D housing preferably not own by anyone. I choose this because the camera has a pop-up flash. The canon’s eTTL flash is complicated if one has to wire it for a bulkhead and even harder to fit a circuit in-line to trigger a strobe electronically and get any form of TTL flash at the business end but there is one method that works. The Canon pop-up flash and optical slave TTL strobes like Inon Z240 Type III works well together. Another thing about the Canon pop-up flash is that it will flash even of it is not so fully popped up! This saves a lot of room inside the housing and Patima has a bit of room on top of the camera so it was destined for a make over.

The housing from the inside looks clean and free of appendages. The circle marked the spot for some major surgery.

Milling took about two 5 minutes. It was not a difficult Tracheotomy…..

Now to shape the Acrylic rods into…..

these ‘thingys’………………………….

Perfect fit!

The thingys or a more fancy named ‘optical ports’ was skewed with some stainless steel sleeves. To strengthen it and also to fit a 1 mm sheathed fibre optic cable.

A bit of epoxy carefully smeared on to hold the optical ports in place and also to seal any gaps.

Once dried testing could be done. Oh just in case any of you sharp-eyed hawks out there the port is indeed a M5 Nexus focus port which incidentally fits the Patima !

Finally the result after the test dive at Manado. Incidentally not long after this experiment Patima decided to introduce ‘optical ports’ in their housings and only for Canon. However, I have also conducted mods on Nikon D80 housing but that is another blog.  Now for the next wager…. Stay tuned. D

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 8:32 PM and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.