Ready for Cozumel (Almost)

Yes! Take a look at this beauty. Looks like a monster, no? It is my new Aquatica Pro Digital housing for the Canon 5D Mark II. Top-of-the-line equipment. And I've fully tricked it out for both still and video use!

I received the housing about 2 weeks ago, just in time to fabricate a slew of parts to retrofit the video lights. The lights themselves were borrowed off my Stingray II video housing, since they still work extremely well. I fabricated a mounting plate for the light arms, and a battery tray for the battery pods. This has taken me about 10 days to do, an hour or two per day. Lots of measuring and adjusting for this custom job.

I also made a carry handle (in blue) to make it easier for deckhands to grab the housing safely when I pass it up at the end of a dive. However, after weighing the whole rig and learning it was about 29 lbs fully loaded, I am thinking that it will need to be moved from water to boat in more than one step. It will weigh closer to 40 lbs if I ever decide to outfit two Ikelite 400's instead of one. Very likely, I'll choose only one mode of shooting for a dive (video or still) and leave the unnecessary hardware at home.

Working with this housing has presented a few new challenges:

There is no eTTL coverter available for the Canon 5D Mark II. I had hoped to use my old Heinrichs-Weikamp eTTL converter but all my tests showed it just doesn't understand what the Canon 5D/II is trying to tell it. The strobes simply don't fire. The Aquatica 5D/II housing has the strobes wired straight, without any converter. This is good enough for manual shooting so I'll have to adapt.

Nobody makes an external color compensation filter for a 5" port. So I'll be doing a lot more manual white balancing. I'm not sure how well this will work for video, however.

Since the Canon 5D/II will not autofocus while shooting video, it would have been great to have a manual focus ring for my lenses. Unfortunately, the focus knob in the flat port is too far away from the focus ring of the lens. Any gear would interfere with the lens rim. This is something I hope to work on when I get back from Coz.

So... what's next? 70 glorious days in Cozumel Mexico where I get to learn how to take stunning 21 megapixel photos with this rig. Add video to that and I'll be very, very busy!

Oops...

Just after the photo shoot, I broke the light arm mounting plate by grabbing one of the arms and pulling upwards. I had made the plate out of plexiglas and apparently the stuff is too brittle for what I'm trying to do. Good thing I learned this now! I still have plenty of time to fabricate a new one out of polycarb, which should be significantly stronger.