These are photos I shot, with a strobe actually, on a trip to Catalina in June 03. The vis was not too great, and the day was partially sunny. This was the second time I took out this strobe. It’s a DS50, hooked through the housing to the camera, so it is fired manually by the camera, but not TTL. It has maybe two intensity settings, I think the new DS51 has something like 6.
The first time I shot with this strobe (5-03) the lighting was way too harsh. I took it out a second time that day with the diffuser cap on and it was still too harsh. This trip I outfitted the diffuser cap with 10 or 20 layers (I forget) of frosted mylar all stacked and trimmed and fitted inside the cap and I think it worked great, and haven’t really tinkered with the amount of frosted mylar since.
None of these shots are really great. Here I’m busy trying to come up with some working exposures and am not too concerned with composing something serious. I did start to hit on some shots where the subject was lit and still the background maintained some ocean color and hadn’t turned moonscape black. I’m into getting ocean color in my backgrounds when shooting daytime, even when I’m using a strobe.
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