I have been taking underwater images for over 25 years, so it was a bit daunting when I finally made the switch from film to digital. I knew I would eventual get a DSLR system, but decided to start with a smaller and easier to use compact digital camera as a stepping stone. At the beginning of 2005 I spent several months comparing cameras, housings and strobes.
The easiest decision was the strobe. After looking at a few models, which is limited when it comes to compact digital cameras, I settled on the Inon D2000. This strobe had only just come on the market, but after reading reviews about the earlier model D180, this strobe sounded ideal.
The main reason you need an external strobe is to limit backscatter, those little flares of light that appear in many photos taken with the built-in flash of compact cameras. By placing an external strobe away from the camera any particles in the water that reflect light will be highlighted on their side, bouncing the flare of light away from the lens rather than directly back into it. Other reasons for adding an external strobe include they are a lot more powerful than the built-in flash and cover a wider angle, allowing you to add a wide angle lens to your camera and shoot images of larger marine life.
I decided to buy the Inon D2000 after reading about its many impressive features. It is small, but very powerful, uses four AA batteries, allows 24 power settings and has a fibre optical link to the camera. It also uses the Inon Clear Photo System, a unique Inon development with reads the flash output from the camera and matches it, giving you TTL, I will go into more detail about this later.
Once I had settled on a strobe I then looked at all the cameras that would work with it (Sea Optics staff and website provide a great assistance when buying a complete digital camera system) and decided to purchase the Olympus C7070 WZ and the PT027 housing. When ordering the Inon D2000 I also bought the Inon baseplate, arm and the fibre optical cable to suit the housing.
Upon receiving my Inon D2000 the first thing that impressed me was its neat compact size. This strobe is tiny, about 100mm wide and deep, but it is more powerful than many strobes twice its size, with a guide number of 20 (ISO100 at 1m in air). The strobe has two flash tubes, arranged in a T shape, that gives a nice circular beam and covers an angle of 100 degrees, and by adding a diffuser it covers 110 degrees. It also has a built-in focusing light.
All the switches are located at the back of the strobe head, very handy for changing settings without moving your camera away from the subject. The use of four AA batteries is very convenient, allowing a choice of recyclable or alkaline batteries. The battery compartment is very neat and with a clear lid, allowing you to check that the o-ring is properly sealed. This o-ring is the only one that you have to maintain.
After reading all
the
instructions I found it quite easy to connect the strobe to the camera housing
with the fibre optical cable. As mentioned earlier Inon have developed a Clear
Photo System that allows you to use the camera’s TTL (through the lens
metering which measures the light coming through the camera lens to give you
perfectly exposed photos, most of the time). This works by placing a black film
over the camera’s built-in flash which stops the camera’s flash lighting the
subject, but allows enough non-visible light through for the Inon fibre optical
cable to read it. The end of the fibre optical cable is connected to a bracket
positioned on the housing in front of the camera’s flash. Most compact digital
cameras use a pre flash system, with a weak pre-flash given off to measure the
TTL exposure before the main flash fires. The Inon strobe reads this pre-flash
and then matches the camera’s flash output, to give you correctly exposed
photos. Inon have a patent on this system and call it S-TTL or Synchronisation
Thru The Lens.After assembling the camera, housing and strobe system I did some test shots in a pool. I was very pleased with the S-TTL, shooting some exciting photos of the creepy crawly, it exposed every shot perfectly. I was now ready to tackle some marine life.
From my very first dive with this system I was impressed. The Inon D2000 strobe was easy to use and produced some great photos. Almost every photo was perfectly exposed, although the camera did have problems with darker subjects, tending to underexpose them. There are two S-TTL settings on the strobe, S-TTL and LOW, and the quickest way to adjust the exposure was by switching between these, which appears to give around an f-stop difference. I quickly learnt for lighter subjects to set it on LOW and darker subjects switch to S-TTL. For even more control over the exposure there are 12 settings on the External Auto switch, and by being on either S-TTL or LOW this gives 24 power level settings. I have found that I have rarely had to use the External Auto Settings, except on dark subjects.
I have now been using this camera system for over a year and have shot many thousands of images in varying light and visibility. The Inon D2000 has performed flawlessly, in fact I have been far more impressed with the strobe than the camera, but I won’t bore you with a list of the camera’s faults. The strobe has a very fast recycling time, around 1.8 seconds to full charge with NiMH batteries. Only a couple of times have I missed a s
hot because the strobe hadn’t recharged, most of the
time I would miss a shot because the camera wasn’t ready or was failing to
focus. The strobe has never run out of power on a dive, even on double dives
when I have shot over 200 images. According to the manufacturer you can get 520
full power flashes from a set of NiMH batteries. This should be enough to last
you four or five dives in a day on a liveaboard boat.The Clear Photo System works superbly and has given me perfectly exposed photos, most of the time. I have achieved a far better success rate with this system than with my old film camera. Naturally it doesn’t work every time, but by adjusting the power levels on the strobe you can correct this on most occasions.
Using this system in dirty water, with lots of suspended particles, didn’t create any backscatter problems. The strobe would light the particles, but they wouldn’t appear as flares, just little specks if visible at all. The only time I have had backscatter in any of the images is when I have positioned the strobe too close to the camera.
The Inon D2000 has worked great with both macro and wide angle subjects, giving a nice even light. It even captures flesh tones very well, which I always find the best test of any strobe. The focusing light is handy when photographing subjects in caves, under ledges or in wrecks. All the limitations I have found with the camera/strobe system have all been to do with the camera.
The Inon D2000 is a strobe that I would recommend to anyone with a compact digital camera. It will improve your underwater photos dramatically, limiting backscatter and allowing you to take wonderful pictures even when the visibility is not ideal. Inon have also released a less expensive D2000s model, which is basically the same strobe without the focusing light and External Auto switch.