Weefine Ringlicht

VROEGER,  newbie underwater photographers were often advised to start with close-up work. You could pre-set your camera and flashgun, so all you had to do on the dive was find a subject, frame it with the wire-framer supplied with your close-up lens, and press the button for nicely exposed, sharply focused pictures.

Al het andere introduceerde zoveel variabelen dat je succespercentage onvermijdelijk werd verlaagd, soms tot nul, totdat je enige ervaring en expertise had opgebouwd.

The biggest challenge in this has always been lighting. You generally need the camera so close to the subject that positioning one or two strobes to deliver even illumination is tricky.

On land, the ring-flash, a strobe with a circular flash tube that fits around the lens, has been an accepted solution for years. Now Weefine has a similar product for the underwater photographer, the Weefine Ring Light 1000, a ring-light that produces a continuous beam of light rather than a flash.

Het ontwerp

Het licht komt van een reeks LED's die in een cirkelvormig patroon zijn gerangschikt. Een L-vormig uitsteekbaar bitje houdt de batterij vast, een oplaadbaar 18650 lithiumtype. Schroef eenvoudigweg de batterijbehuizing, de lange arm van de L, los om toegang te krijgen tot de batterij om deze op te laden.

Batterij en oplader worden beide meegeleverd, en als je ergens zonder stroom zit, kun je met een adapter die bij de lamp wordt geleverd, in plaats daarvan drie AAA-batterijen gebruiken.

Aan de zijkant van de batterijbehuizing bevindt zich de aan/uit-schakelaar. Houd deze een paar seconden ingedrukt en het licht gaat aan of uit, of druk kort op de schakelaar om de lichtopbrengst te wijzigen. Je kunt kiezen uit hoge, gemiddelde en lage instellingen.

The unit is completely self-contained, so once you’ve charged the battery and screwed it to the light, the unit simply screws to the lens-mounting thread on your housing or, as I chose to use it, to the front thread of an add-on macro lens. Thread size is 67mm. There are no other connections to camera.

Focussen

Focusing is critical in close-up work, and the focus mechanism of the camera has only a small range in which to work if you use an add-on lens, so I quickly found a simple technique to get good pictures. The camera I used had a lens that could be zoomed from moderate wide-angle to short telephoto, so I first set the zoom to adjust the field of view, wider for bigger subjects, telephoto for smaller ones.

Then I found the subject using the viewing screen, not always an easy job, and moved the camera back and forth until the picture looked sharp. A half-press on the shutter-button fine-tuned focus, and then a final squeeze and the shot was in the zak.

Then, and this is really important, I repeated the process. And again. When you’re shooting really small subjects, the slightest movement of the camera can alter focus and framing, so taking plenty of pictures improves your chances of getting something acceptable. And because this is a continuous light and not a flash, it doesn’t have the blinding brilliance of a strobe, so I didn’t feel uncomfortable taking repetitive exposures.

In gebruik

The first dive on which I used the Weefine was a Red Sea night-dive, and as soon as I was under water it was obvious that it was bright enough to be my primary dive-light. Bonus. And the battery delivered enough power to keep the light shining brightly for an hour and a half, after which it took around three hours to fully recharge.

Later in the week I used it on a Thistlegorm night-dive with a pair of dive-buddies who commented that the wide beam lit up the wreck very nicely for them, too. During the day it was still more than up to it’s job as a macro-foto licht, zelfs in ondiep, helder verlicht water.

After some trial and error I found that setting the camera to under-expose by two-thirds of a stop and then tweaking the image a bit in Photoshop gave me the best results. I was using a small-sensor compact camera, so depth of field wasn’t much of an kwestie, en kreeg belichtingen van ongeveer 1/80 seconde bij f5.6 met ISO 200.

If you’re using a larger-sensor camera and need to stop down to get a bit more depth of field, to f8 or f11 say, you’ll need to up the ISO a bit to achieve a decent shutter speed, something that modern digitaal will cope with extremely well.