DIY Remote Flash Housing

Ever since Transworld’s 2005 Photo issue I wanted to shoot using flash in the water. More than half the images in that issue were made using various forms of remote flash and the results were ridiculous. I hadn’t shot a single frame of surf at that time but those images inspired me to start hunting waves with my camera. 

See pics of my do-it-yourself flash housing and the building process below.

I had plenty of experience using strobes and various slaving systems and most of the gear too. But, I didn’t have a necessary protection for the flash and radio receiver. Coming from my background in architecture, travel , people and underwater photography, I’ve come to believe that 95% of the time if you are going to use a flash it can’t be on the camera. The other 5% of the time (cocktail parties, easter egg hunts, nights out with friends) on-camera flash is fine.

So here, four years later I finally put together a flash housing so I can start creating some images similar to the ones that originally inspired me to shoot surf. It would have been easy if only I had bought the flash housing from Sean at SPL, but instead, for economic reasons, I decided to make it myself.

This project would have been fairly simple if I had decided to build it while I was back in the states but unfortunately I chose to “make it happen” in Bali. Without a Home Depot down the street things took a little longer… but after a trip to Singapore and countless runs through the non-tourist industrial sites of Bali, I finally collected the necessary parts to put it together.

Important Disclaimer: This is a personal photography project and is not intend to promote your doing the same. There are no guarantees that it will work. In fact, I expect this home made flash housing to fail catastrophically at some point in which case I would lose some expensive equipment. I'm willing to live with that. If you're not then don't try this at home. If I had a lawyer, he would tell me to say this. 

click an image for the larger version

Parts list:

1x Pelican 4100 dive light (picked it up in Singapore from Marvid Int’l who were gracious enough to sell me just the light housing without the guts.)

1x Pelican 1010 waterproof case (Marvid again)

1x Wire Seal thingy (some electronics mall in Singapore)

Nikon SB-800 Speedlight or similar

Pocket Wizard Plus Radio slave kit (transmitter and receiver)

Loads of various 5 minute epoxies, silicone, rounded files, a borrowed drill, q-tips, a leatherman tool, nuts and bolts, fingers, blood, sweat, tears from the epoxy fumes, Tupperware, swimming pool, messy beach break, frustration, hopes and dreams.

The Idea

I thought a dive light with a built in pistol style grip would be the simplest and most intuitive shape for the flash housing. Especially for the swimmer holding the flash, I told him, "Just act like it’s a gun and shoot the surfer as he goes by.” Unfortunately, most people know how to hold a gun, not really a good thing in my opinion, but the concept was helpful here.

I was hoping to just get a dive light big enough to hold both the Nikon Sb800 flash and the Pocket Wizard radio receiver but to no avail. So instead I decided to just use the light housing for the flash and connect some other case for the radio receiver.

The first thing I did was seal up the automatic pressure release valves in the case as well the on/off switch that comes on the light. Features that I had no use for and I viewed as a port of entry for water some time in the future. All eliminated with 5-minute epoxy inside and out.

I didn’t think epoxy alone was going to hold the two cases together under the stresses of duck dives and the occasional wall of water crashing onto it so I decided in addition to epoxy they should be joined by thru-bolts. I drilled a four bolt pattern and wire hole on the radio housing first and then using the first as a template I drilled the same pattern on the back of the light housing.


At this point, I also drilled a hole for the antenna to pass through in the radio housing.

Next, I test fitted everything multiple times before any epoxy was ever mixed. The largest drill bit available to me was not quite large enough for the wire seal thingy to mount in the radio housing, so I had to carefully grind out the hole with a combination of a file and the knife of my Leatherman.

So once the hole was the right size, I epoxied the wire seal into place top and bottom.

With 5-minute epoxy I was able to work in steps without having to wait very long between steps.

Next, I epoxied the bolts into the radio housing and encased the heads completely with epoxy. Let dry.

Now it was time to mount the Radio housing to the light housing with epoxy. I created an epoxy ring around each screw hole on the light housing and pressed the radio housing into place until the epoxy hardened. (5 minutes)

At this point I wasn’t completely satisfied with the sealing job between the two pieces so I ran another bead of epoxy completely around the outside where the two meet.

Next, I screwed the nuts on to bolts on the inside of the light housing. I could only hand-tighten them because of my reach and lack of tools but I secured them anyway by encasing the nuts in epoxy as well.

The unit is pretty much finished at this point so now it was time to test it in the water for leaks.

First test in the pool was a failure: the seal that comes with small pelican 1010 case wasn’t enough to keep water out more than 1 foot under water. I kind of expected this and had an idea to just put a thicker o-ring in its place. Luckily, I had some random pieces of Tupperware lying around (who doesn’t?) which had an o-ring that fit perfectly in the groove. It was much fatter which means it’s compressed much more when the case is closed. And that was enough to seal the case at least at 3 meters of depth.

So with the pool test complete, I took it into the ocean (empty) to make sure it could stand up to duck dives and random water movement. I slapped it against the face of waves and just went through the motions of in-water photography stresses. No leaks.

I positioned the flash unit in place with some removable pieces of foam.

Note: I think the weakest point of the housing is the radio case. If anything is going to leak, it would happen here. Possibly fatigue in the plastic hinge from the fat o-ring. So to avoid a complete loss of my gear (radio and flash) I filled the wire hole between the two cases with soft silicone adhesive to basically isolate the two from each other. If one leaks, I only have to replace one piece of equipment instead of two. I chose the soft stuff so I could remove it if I ever needed the cable for my other non-water flash projects.

My next step was to load the flash and radio receiver and swim it out while my friend Affan (and soon to be official “Flash Guy”) triggered the flash from the beach. I wanted to test the range of the radio signal especially being in the water.

The pocket wizards are good up to about 800 feet but radio signals don’t penetrate water very well so I need to know how it would work in the waves. At about 500-600 ft out the signal became less reliable which was still plenty of range for the places I’m likely to shoot. So all test pass and now its ready to shoot with.

The next step was to get it out in the water with Affan (Flash Guy) while I shot from the beach. I wanted to test the flash power and exposure settings while also getting some teamwork experience with Affan. The waves were really small and the boys on the beach volunteered to take their longboards out do some modeling for us in the ankle high waves.

I learned what I needed from this little exercise. My guesses on exposures and flash power were pretty close but not quite right. Now I know the power adjustments to make for the future and we’re ready for some bigger waves and some hi performance sunset surfing. Stay tuned for more remote flash shots with some of Bali’s best surfers. The ocean studio is now open.