A Few Images From Saturday Evening 6/26

Hard to say on strobe power being enough. Can always use more.

I do think in the first shot that you see a huge light dropoff, so if you were trying to light the whole area, you didn't have enough power, or you didn't diffuse enough.

The second shot - not quite sure what it is - seems overly bright, with harsh-edged shadows. (You may or may not like the hard edges.)

The shot with the Sea Pen looks like a strobe miss to me, with the light behind the subject.

When I started with strobes (pair of YS-D1's mounted to RX100 II housing), I usually left the diffusion domes on whether shooting macro or wide angle. They make lighting a bit more forgiving in certain ways.  I recommend you try them for a while, and get used to their look before taking them off.  Unless you're chronically short of strobe power.

I've moved the strobes to D810, and now D850. Until the D850 I shot in TTL and didn't master the light power. I've still not mastered it, but I've had to learn something because the D850 doesn't have a pop-up to control the lighting, and I have a non-TTL trigger instead.

Here's my take on strobes. FIrst, they are very hard to use with wide angle due to the light dropoff. You end up with a mix of ambient and strobe, and some partially-lit areas can look very good, then green in the shadows, then good again as you get strobe lighting. So figure that to be a more complicated situation to master.

For macro, you often have too much power, unless you're not close enough. This is where it's so easy to blow highlights. Simple things like Sea Rods have a reflective or fluorescent component that is easy to blow with strobes. Some silvery scales are like shooting mirrors in a well - how to balance lighting? Here I say be judicious with light power, always shoot at base ISO, and learn to reduce highlights in post.

It's the white stuff that normally gives you highlight fits. Bringing out fine detail in Christmas Tree Worms is a good practice, from shooting to strobe power to post-processing.

I have a lot of my shots up on my personal web site, including a short section of before/after post-processing underwater shots here:

https://www.cjcphoto.net/

If you have any questions how I shot or processed any of the shots on my web pages, I'll try to give you the answers.  I started shooting DSLR underwater in 2016, before that one year with RX100 and strobes, and before that all point-n-shoot, mostly with built-in flash.