I usually don't do night dives.

I did last night.

I wanted to test that contraption I built 6 months ago for my video case which adds two Princeton Tec $80 dive lights as strobes to see if it could rival the $1,299 light system that is sold for my housing... Believe it or not I think it actually did!
I was really impressed by the light quality I got out of that weird assembly. I think the stuff that really made it was the 99 cents plastic cups that I tie-wrapped around each of my lights as makeshift diffusers...

What surprised me the most was the uniformity of the light level in my footage. I was expecting that I would have dark corners in the bottom left and right due to the fact that the lights were pointing slightly higher than the camera. It actually seems to be helping the diffusion and although there are parts of the picture that are darkers than others, the overall result is pretty uniform.

The thing that really killed me was how heavy the whole thing is topside! The two lights with their 8 D-cells each, probably add 10lbs to my already heavy and bulky camera case... However, underwater, it's only slightly buoyant, which is better than the shoot-to-the-surface buoyant of the case without strobes.  

Another advantage I see in my contraption is the battery life of my makeshift strobes: Princeton Tec Shockwave LED lights are sold for a 20 hours burn time! The $1,299 system is sold for only 90 minutes burn time... What a ripoff.

So here's the video, shot in HD 1080i with a Sony HDR-SR11 (60 GB Hard drive), AVCHD native encoding, re-encoded for the web at 720p@6Mb/s. Housing is a Top Dawg II (http://www.topdawgvideo.com/) with the standard monitor back and the now famous two additional DIY strobes from Princeton Tec.

As far as the dive itself was concerned, we dove Shaw's Cove in Laguna Beach, water was cold in the 55, bottom time was about 1 hour. Lot's of small octopus, one large one (that nobody but me saw) and a running lobster.