Articles
The author would like to thank Backscatter for providing a pair of their Hybrid Flash (HF-1) units with a complete set of diffusers, and Scubapix for local support in Australia.
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At the beginning of this year, I had the chance to test pre-production versions of the Backscatter Hybrid Flash in Indonesia, and I was very impressed with these “dual-purpose” strobes/video lights. As a powerful strobe with an attractive quality of light, the Hybrid Flash allowed me to capture images of a variety of wide-angle subjects that I was a very pleased with. However, I did just a handful of dives, only scratching the surface of what the Hybrid Flash could do, and I was extremely keen to get my hands on the units in their final form to properly put them through their paces.
The review you’re reading now is the result of my extensive testing of a pair of production versions of the Backscatter Hybrid Flash (HF-1) in Australia’s temperate waters. Over a five-week period, I was in the water with the Hybrid Flash for around 50 hours and produced more than 7,000 photos.
A local cheeky blue groper comes in close to see what new gadgets I have brought back this time (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3 at 41mm, Nauticam FCP, f/13, 1/80s, ISO 250)
Apart from the power dial—which I will discuss in the next section—the Hybrid Flash hasn’t noticeably changed from the pre-production unit, so the first impressions I offered in the previous article remain valid, and I will refrain from repeating them here, in the interest of conciseness. Instead, this aricle will take an in-depth look at the newly introduced range of diffusers specially designed for the Hybrid Flash as well as aspects I didn’t have the opportunity to try previously, including photographing macro subjects, remote shooting, burst shooting, and capturing video.
While the images in my first-look article were all shot on North Sulawesi’s vibrant tropical reefs, the photos included in this review were taken in green, grayish blue, or cyan temperate water, with visibility ranging from 10 to 40 feet. Taken together, I hope they provide complementary perspectives on how the Hybrid Flash fares in different environments.
All-black test rig: Nikon Z9 in Nauticam housing with 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash
1. Refined Units
Power Control
The only two changes I noticed compared to the excellent pre-production units involved the power dial. First, it has been enhanced to click responsively, and it is easy to adjust power levels by feel, without looking at the unit, even when wearing 3mm gloves. Secondly, while there was been no change in the maximum rated power—an impressive guide number (GN) of 40—the labels now read as follows: +2, +1, F, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16. In total, the power settings span a range of 5.5 f-stops, with 11 half-stop increments.
For me, the new labeling took some getting used to since “F” on the earlier units denoted full power, as you’d expect, while on the production units, “F” is actually a quarter of maximum power—“+2” being the full power setting. In any event, I rarely needed to go beyond “F” power while shooting in temperate waters, but I certainly enjoyed using the maximum power (now “+2”) when photographing expansive scenes in Indonesia (see my first look article).
From a usability standpoint, I was pleased to see the power dial has a hard stop: You cannot go from “+2” to minimum power by mistake. For wide angle, I was running the strobes between “F” and “1/4” settings, which meant it was convenient enough to adjust the strobe output by feel only: I would rotate the dial clockwise till it stopped (“+2”); then I knew two clicks back would return me to “F”, and from there, one click would mean a 1/2-stop decrement. Sensibly, the power dial is shaped differently from the mode dial, so there is no chance of mistaking one for the other. When shooting macro at night, I used a wider range of power levels, and I did wish the labels were visible in the dark—fluorescent stickers would be a welcome addition.
Diffusers
Without diffusers, the Hybrid Flash offers a comfortable 120° beam angle but a cool 6500K color temperature. Fortunately, Backscatter has come up with a wide range of diffusers to help tweak the color temperature to your liking and expand the beam angle even further. No fewer than eight diffusers are available. They are listed below, going from coolest to warmest:
- Ambient blue flat diffuser
- Ambient blue dome diffuser
- 6300K (white) flat diffuser (comes as standard with the strobe)
- 6300K (white) dome diffuser
- 5500K flat diffuser
- 5500K dome diffuser
- 4500K flat diffuser
- 4500K dome diffuser
| Diffuser | Beam Angle with Flat/Dome Diffuser | Light Loss with Flat/Dome Diffuser (in f-stops) |
|---|---|---|
| Ambient blue diffuser | 140°/160° | –1.0/–1.5 |
| No diffuser (6500K) | 120° | — |
| 6300K (white) diffuser | 140°/160° | –0.4/–0.7 |
| 5500K (daylight) diffuser | 140°/160° | –0.4/–0.8 |
| 4500K (warm) diffuser | 140°/160° | –0.5/–0.9 |
Table 1: Measurements provided by Backscatter for beam angle and light loss (compared to using no diffusers)
Given how powerful the Hybrid Flash is, the light loss caused by diffusers is of very little consequence in practice. My strobe light was able to reach this distant five-foot shark, despite using the flat 5500K diffuser (0.4 f-stops loss of light) at the “1/2” power setting. The field of view of my lens is 87° (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3 at 50mm, Nauticam FCP, f/13, 1/100s, ISO 400)
The warmer the diffuser, the more you need to adjust your white balance towards colder colors in order to achieve a color-neutral foreground. In so doing, you’re turning aqua/cyan water backgrounds into proper blue backgrounds, and making blue backgrounds even more saturated. Conversely, pick a cooler diffuser if you’re wishing to make a greenish water background even more green. This logic becomes evident if you shoot with a mirrorless camera and set your white balance to the color temperature of the diffuser: As you toggle between Kelvin settings, you’ll see the water color change through the viewfinder. For each color temperature, you have the choice between a flat diffuser, which softens the light and increases the strobe beam to 140°, and a dome diffuser, which increases it even further, to a whopping 160°.
I experimented with all of the various diffusers, and you’ll find my observations in the next section.
2. Light Spread and Quality
Beam Coverage
I have always been looking to get the widest beam angle for my wide-angle work, and this has meant I use the widest available diffusers on whichever strobes I work with. When Backscatter loaned me their early Hybrid Flash in January, I went straight with a dome diffuser (160° coverage) and stuck with it. It did an excellent job of illuminating large Indonesian reef scenes in visibilities exceeding 50 feet.
Back home in Sydney, I finally tried the flat diffusers (140° coverage) and was very pleased that the beam coverage was still very wide, while making it easy to produce clean photos in visibility of 25 feet. Swapping with the dome diffusers on the same dive, it was much harder to avoid backscatter in these waters. The wide 140° beam was still plenty, feeling much the same as the wide-angle strobes I usually shoot. Still, I would definitely take the dome diffusers with me the next time I travel to clear tropical water, as a 160° beam is wonderful when floating particles are less of a concern.
Overall, the Hybrid Flash’s dual straight tubes with their internal optical diffusers, combined with the various external diffusers, deliver an extra-wide, circular light beam, which I would be happy to use for all my wide-angle photography.
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The dome diffusers are excellent for illuminating extra-large reef scenes: This rock in the Pokemon City sponge garden (Sydney, NSW, Australia) was about 20 feet wide. The corners are a little dirty for my liking, though, which is why I swapped to the flat diffusers for the next image, taken during the same dive in visibility of 40 feet. Top: Edited version with a few backscatter blobs removed and my usual contrast increase, which helps the image pop but makes the lighting appear harsher than it really was. Bottom: The original, unedited image. The dome diffusers are really great at producing even lighting across big surfaces (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3 at 31.5mm, Nauticam housing, Nauticam FCP, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 4500K dome diffusers, f/13, 1/100s, ISO 500)
On the same dive with 40 feet visibility, the flat diffusers allowed me to produce gin-clear water backgrounds. I love how these warm diffusers revealed the pink and red colors of our local sponge gardens, while yielding beautiful blue water (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3 at 28.5mm, Nauticam housing, Nauticam FCP, f/14, 1/100s, ISO 500)
Color Temperature
Someone parked their bike in the wrong place (in the middle of Cabbage Tree Bay, north of Sydney), but it proved useful as a visual reference for some comparative diffusers tests. This was in 25 feet of water on a pretty clear day, the visibility was 20–25 feet, and the water tint was a rather dull, unsaturated blue (still better than green!). Let’s see how different diffusers fared in terms of tweaking the water backgrounds.
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Clockwise from top-left: 4500K diffuser, 5500K diffuser, 6300K (white) diffuser, ambient blue diffuser, and without strobes (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3, Nauticam WWL-C, f/11, 1/125s, ISO 200)
In the above series, all photos have had a global white balance adjustment using the same spot in the sand as reference, and the 4500K diffuser did make the water bluer than it really was. The 5500K diffuser was closer to reality, while the 6300K diffuser made the water look greener.
The ambient blue diffusers are an interesting beast: Despite maxing out Lightroom’s tint correction towards the right, the strobe-lit sand still looks desaturated compared to the earlier photos, because of the lack of red in the light. This results in the water having a slight magenta tint (easily corrected with Lightroom’s HSL sliders), which doesn’t appear in the last image (ambient light only), because it hasn’t been color-biased by that blue light. But let’s go back to the drawing board: These blue diffusers are designed to mimick tropical ambient light in depths between 10 and 30 feet, so using them in temperate waters was a tad more experimental. I did prefer the look of the images at slightly shallower depths (18 feet), which is where I photographed the Port Jackson shark in the next image.
The ambient blue diffusers produce a desaturated, cold color palette and although I like the ethereal feel of the first Port Jackson shark photo, it will only suit a minority of subjects and scenes. For me, the main advantage of this diffuser is how effectively it blends artificial and ambient light together. You can’t see any color transition on the sand, whereas the second photo carries the expected cyan color in the remote sand patch beyond the strobes’ reach.
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Top: 2x ambient blue flat diffusers, f/16, 1/60s, ISO 200. Bottom: 2x 4500K flat diffusers, f/16, 1/50s, ISO 200. Both photos are unedited except for global white balance, manually adjusted with a color picker on the same sand patch, near the shark’s pectoral fin (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3, Nauticam WWL-C, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash)
The Bottom Line: Which Diffusers Do You Need?
More often than not, underwater photographers strive to get a bluer water background, which makes the 4500K diffuser my number one recommendation. The flat version is the best all-rounder choice, because it’s plenty wide and soft for anyone’s typical wide angle work and more forgiving than the dome version in non-crystal-clear waters. In clearer waters (over 50 feet visibility), I would switch to the dome version when photographing extra-large reefs or whenever my subject distance changes unpredictably (think shark feeding or excited fur seals).
A tale of two sharks: The flat diffusers produce a smooth light fall-off, making it easy to illuminate this Port Jackson shark without overexposing the bright sand. Yet the light reached far enough in the scene to color the gray nurse shark passing in the background (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3 at 38mm, Nauticam FCP, f/13, 1/50s, ISO 200)
At temperate dive sites, while I still start my dives with the flat 4500K diffusers mounted, I carry an extra set of flat, colder diffusers to give myself some options with background colors. The flat 6300K (white) diffusers that come with the strobe are excellent at making greenish water very green, which can be beautiful with the right subject/foreground, and they are still quite usable in tropical waters, provided you don’t mind playing with HSL sliders to correct your water background.
Cold diffusers have the ability to make aqua/cyan water greener (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon AF-S 105mm f/2.8, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 6300K flat diffusers)
More often though, I leave the 6300K (white) diffusers at home and carry the 5500K flat diffusers as my second set, for they produce more true-to-life water backgrounds. The 4500K’s very blue backgrounds are visually pleasing but too good to be true—at least for dive sites around Sydney!
This is as blue as it gets in Sydney’s south. There’s no denying that cooler, bluer backgrounds can look better, but if it’s authenticity that you want, go for the 5500K diffusers (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3 at 46mm, Nauticam FCP, f/13, 1/125s, ISO 320)
The blue filters are more of a specialist accessory, something to own if you like experimenting. They are very good at clearing shadows while blending with the ambient light color, provided you dive in the right depth/conditions and don’t mind a reduced color palette. They would produce interesting results for shallow wrecks and freediver portraits, and I do want to experiment with them more.
3. Macro and Close-ups
Whenever I take it upon myself to write a major review, I ask members of my underwater photography school, The Underwater Club, if there’s anything they want me to find out about the new product, and then I include it in my testing.
One request I received was to look at how suitable the Hybrid Flash would be for macro photography. The truth is, for such a powerful strobe, I had planned to focus my testing on wide angle, but it’s actually a very good question: Is the Hybrid Flash capable of producing very subtle faint flashes of light or will it overexpose close-up macro shots?
Here’s the good news: With its 12 power settings, spanning 5.5 f-stops, the Hybrid Flash had no problem properly exposing macro, super macro and open-aperture subjects. In fact, I only went as low as “1/16”, whereas the minimum power setting is a 1/2 stop lower.
The Hybrid Flash can be turned down to deliver just the necessary amount of light for open-aperture shots (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon AF-S 105mm f/2.8, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 4500K flat diffusers, f/4, 1/100s, ISO 100)
Even in a super-macro scenario like this, using a relatively open aperture, the Hybrid Flash was set at power “1/16”, a 1/2 stop above its minimum setting (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon AF-S 105mm f/2.8, Nauticam SMC-1, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 4500K flat diffusers, f/13, 1/200s, ISO 64)
For close-focus wide-angle photography, I like my strobes to have a wide beam and small form factor. The Hybrid Flash isn’t small, but it’s easy enough to maneuver around (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon AF-S 105mm f/2.8, Nauticam EMWL-1 with 100° objective lens, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 6300K flat diffusers, f/22, 1/200s, ISO 640)
4. Remote Shooting
I sometimes take a third or fourth strobe with me for wide-angle dives, if I have a dive buddy willing to step up as lighting assistant. We have a thorough briefing and establish hand signals for me to tell them if the remote strobe needs its power increased or decreased. Alas, sometimes we can’t understand each other underwater, and I end up swimming back and forth, resulting in a loss of shooting time.
The Hybrid Flash comes with a smart solution for this problem: It lets you remotely change the power of the off-camera strobe. Simply set the on-camera (master) strobe to the power you want for the remote strobe (which is set in REM mode), and press and hold the test button. Your master strobe will emit a series of short flashes to communicate the desired power setting to the remote strobe, which will answer with a single flash after a second or so to confirm it understood these instructions and has updated its power setting.
A remote strobe is a great way to add depth to a wide-angle shot. During this dusk winter dive, ambient light went missing faster than I anticipated and using a remote strobe made for more interesting photos (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3, Nauticam FCP, 1x Backscatter Hybrid Flash above the housing, 1x Backscatter Hybrid Flash hand-held by the model, both with 5500K flat diffusers, f/13, 1/25s, ISO 2000)
I took a series of images to test a remote setup, and the remote strobe fired reliably at a distance of 20 feet. However, I found I had to lean around three feet closer (a distance of 17 feet) when I wanted to communicate a different power setting to the remote strobe. The visibility was around 25 feet, and I am sure a greater range can be achieved in clearer water.
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Left: One Hybrid Flash with 4500K flat diffuser above the housing. No remote strobe—boring shot (f/13, 1/100s, ISO 800). Middle: One Hybrid Flash above the housing, one set up on a muck stick 20 feet away, both with 4500K flat diffusers (f/13, 1/60s, ISO 800). Right: Same setup, off-camera strobe power remotely dialled down (f/13, 1/60s, ISO 800) (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3, Nauticam FCP)
To be remotely triggered, the Hybrid Flash doesn’t need a battery powered light sensor: All you have to do is attach the supplied light pipe and rotate it so that it points towards the master strobe. While this works great with the remote strobe on a muck stick or tripod, it takes some practice to line everything up when the strobe is carried by a model, especially when said model is on the move.
The model was swimming across the background and the strobe she held fired intermittently, most likely as the light pipe got partially obstructed (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3, Nauticam FCP, 1x Backscatter Hybrid Flash above the housing, 1x Backscatter Hybrid Flash hand-held by the model, both with 5500K flat diffusers, f/13, 1/25s, ISO 2000)
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a third Hybrid Flash so that I could keep two on the housing and evenly light my foregrounds. Not only that, I suspect this would have increased my remote triggering success rate when the strobe was hand-held by a swimming model. Also, the light pipe is too short for scenarios where I want the model’s body to hide the strobe (e.g., silhouettes). I’d love to see Backscatter come up with a “light pipe extender” that the model could carry and point back at the master strobe.
All in all, the Hybrid Flash’s remote mode is excellent: You can add depth to wide-angle images without buying a battery-powered remote trigger, and you save heaps of time not having to swim back and forth for power adjustments. Moreover, if you already own one or more of Backscatter’s Mini Flash 2 strobes, you can use them as masters/slaves in combination with the Hybrid Flash.
If you plan on shooting wide-angle with off-camera lighting a lot, I would seriously consider getting a third Hybrid Flash, as its powerful enough to contribute to a shot while being many feet away. In all the above photos, the remote strobe was only firing between “F” and “1/4” power, and I hadn’t taken the diffuser off.
5. Burst Shooting
At its maximum power (+2), the Hybrid Flash recycles within a respectable 2.17 seconds (per Backscatter data, reproduced in Table 2), and like any strobe, the recycle time shortens as you reduce the power. It is worth noting that a 50% reduction in power doesn’t quite equate to a 50% reduction in recycle time.
Notably, the Hybrid Flash can keep up with 30fps continuous shooting when you dial it down to a 1/2 stop below “1/8” power. While this is impressive, I also wanted to know how much more I could increase the power when shooting burst rates between 3fps and 10fps, which is what most shooters will ever need in terms of capturing underwater action and behaviors.
I dunked the Hybrid Flash in a tub filled with water, played around with the burst rate of my Nikon Z9, and compared histograms. My findings are summarized in Table 3.
| Power Level | GN | Recycle Time to GN |
Recycle Time to Next Fire |
Number of Flashes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +2 | 40 | 2.17 sec | 1.67 sec | 375+ |
| +1 | 34 | 1.17 sec | 0.87 sec | 800+ |
| F | 29 | 0.86 sec | 0.67 sec | 1,000+ |
Table 2: Hybrid Flash recycle times and number of flashes at the three most powerful settings (source: Backscatter)
| Power Setting | Burst Speed | Light Decrease Between Shots | Number of Flashes Before a Black Frame | Frequency of Black Frames After First One | Total Number of Shots Taken | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1/4 | 10fps | Smooth | 9 | Every 2–3 shots | 49 | |
| 1/4–0.5 f-stops | 10fps | Smooth | 14 | Every 2–3 shots | 42 | |
| 1/8 | 10fps | Very smooth | 43 | None | 43 | |
| 1/4 | 8fps | Smooth | 16 | Every 4 shots | 37 | |
| 1/4 | 6fps | Very smooth | 24 | None | 37 | Decrease during first 24 shots, then stable |
| 1/2 | 5fps | Smooth | 5 | Every 1–2 shots | 26 | |
| 1/2 | 4fps | Very smooth | 7 | Every 3 shots | 25 | |
| 1/2 | 3fps | Very smooth | 13 | None | 25 | Decrease during first 13 shots, then stable |
| F | 3fps | Noticeable | 2 | Every second shot | 15 |
Table 3: The results of my testing to see how the Hybrid Flash kept up when shooting bursts
At “1/4” power, I’d be happy shooting 1-second bursts at 10fps. If I wanted to shoot several seconds at that power, dialling down to 6fps would ensure no black frames. Should I need “1/2” power, 4fps would be fine for 1–2-second bursts, while 3fps would give me no black frames.
During the five weeks of this review, I didn’t encounter many subjects that called for fast burst speeds, but it was nice to shoot giant cuttlefish action at power “1/2”, knowing for a fact that I wouldn’t be running out of light.
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Seven shots taken within four seconds at power level “1/2”: “Cuttlefish rage” is what happens when two male giant cuttlefish cannot settle who is the strongest by show of body length nor skin patterns. In such cases, one loses its temper and grabs the other male violently to try and bite him (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3, Nauticam FCP-1, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 5500K flat diffusers, f/16, 1/50s, ISO 400)
6. High-Speed Sync Mode
The Hybrid Flash supports high-speed sync (HSS), provided you use a compatible flash trigger. This allows you to use shutter speeds higher than your camera’s maximum sync speed and still include strobe light in your exposure. Now, when would you want to do that in the first place? I can think of two scenarios.
First, you’re shooting wide angle and your strobes aren’t powerful enough to balance out the ambient sunlight. If you could keep increasing the shutter speed while firing your strobes, wouldn’t you eventually get your strobes to win the light battle?
In HSS mode strobes fire a series of short bursts of light during the exposure, and unfortunately, as you shorten that exposure, you also cut down the strobe’s contribution. To see this behavior, I performed a series of tests in very shallow water, aiming towards a bright sunball and gradually increasing the shutter speed. I found that the best outcome was running the strobes at their maximum power in normal manual mode.
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Clockwise from top-left: 1/200s (“+2” power); 1/200s (HSS); 1/250s (HSS); 1/320s (HSS); 1/400s (HSS); 1/500s (HSS) (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3, Nauticam FCP-1, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 5500K flat diffuser, f/13, ISO 200)
The second scenario is macro photography with a shallow depth of field, when you want less ambient light in your shot but you can’t close the aperture down. In this scenario, your limiting factor is not strobe power but shutter speed, and this is where HSS comes to the rescue. Backscatter’s comprehensive article on capabilities of the Hybrid Flash provides an illustrative example of how HSS allows you to use wider open apertures while maintaining a darker background.
Overall, I personally don’t find HSS very useful, but if some of your creative projects do require it, you’ll be pleased to know it is supported by the Hybrid Flash.
7. Battery Life
As noted in my first-look article, the Hybrid Flash boasts a humongous battery life, courtesy of its two 5300mAh Li-ion batteries. During the course of this review, I did several 3-hour-long wide-angle dives, coming out with 400–600 shots for each, which were mostly taken between “1/4” and “F” power (which is 6% to 25% of maximum power), and the battery life indicator was still green, meaning I had over 50% of battery left. In Indonesia, I took over 300 shots at higher power settings (25% to 100%) and was still in the green. The only scenario where my battery indicator would go yellow (25% to 50% battery left) was when I used the built-in video lights.
Looking at my notes, on July 9th, I spent a busy 2h40m dive in 12°C water, photographing the yearly aggregation of giant cuttlefish in South Australia. I took around 600 photos, and filmed about 4 minutes of footage with the Hybrid Flash in video mode at full power.
In a nutshell, the powerful batteries in the Hybrid Flash are more than sufficient for anyone’s full day of still photography. If you plan on shooting lots of video, however, but you should be prepared to do an earlier battery swap.
8. Shooting Video
As a die-hard DSLR shooter, one of the most exciting things I noticed when doing my first mirrorless camera test was the ease of toggling between shooting stills and video. With the flick of a switch, I could film interesting motion and behaviors without taking my eye away from the viewfinder.
There was just one problem: It worked only with ambient light on my back, or at night, when my focus light would provide just enough illumination for a macro subject. But with the Hybrid Flash, with its built-in 5,000-lumen video light, it is even easier for mirrorless photographers to swap between photo and video modes, and I found myself recording video clips more than I have ever done.
Granted, 5,000 lumens won’t suffice for every wide-angle filming scenario, but I did have success lighting close-focus wide-angle clips in 30 feet of water on a bright day (see my leafy seadragon footage below) and no issue with filming bigger scenes when it got dark—at depth or during early morning/dusk dives. To maximize the video light output, it is best to remove any diffusers and run them at full power. However, at night I was happy to leave my diffusers on, which expanded the light beams beyond the native 90° angle.
For night macro or close-focus wide-angle filming, I didn’t even bother going into video mode. I stayed in strobe manual mode (M) and switched on the aiming lights by pushing a button whenever I decided to flick from photo to video. Indeed, at maximum power, the focus light delivers 2,000 lumens with the same 90° angle as the video light mode.
Video light test reel (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nauticam FCP-1, Nauticam EMWL-1 with 100° and 160° objective lenses, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash)
9. Final Thoughts
I concluded my first-look article by saying the Hybrid Flash had impressive specifications that ticked pretty much every box on my wish list for a strobe, and I only wanted to spend more time diving it and trying all of its features.
The Hybrid Flash not only packs the widest and most-powerful strobe that I have used so far, it also features built-in video lights that are bright enough for most of the temperate diving environments where I shoot. The video lights would also be usable in tropical waters, provided there isn’t too much ambient light.
I enjoyed using the Hybrid Flash as a remote strobe. Being so powerful, it really opens up creative options for wide-angle off-camera lighting. The ability to remotely change the strobe power is a great time saver, and it spared me from getting too many irritated looks from my model/lighting assistant/buddy (aka wife).
Having a bright, wide beam is great for illuminating large scenes, as is the ability to adjust the spread and temperature of the light using the wide range of diffusers on offer. The strobe can be dialled all the way down to suit macro and super-macro subjects, though I do find myself wanting more options to cut down the beam angle before I can call the Hybrid Flash my ultimate all-around strobe. Fortunately, a dedicated snoot for the Hybrid Flash is in the works, and I can’t wait to try it. Intermediate light modifiers would also be welcome: Something producing a 60 to 90° beam to facilitate shadow control and light shaping would be ideal.
I am also very curious to try the forthcoming TTL mode, which Backscatter tells me can utilize Sony’s native TTL protocol for the highest accuracy, and offers audible alerts when the flash output isn’t sufficient. Expect a sequel to this review when these extra features become available.
Two Australian fur seals playing near Martin Island, Port Kembla, New South Wales, Australia (Nikon Z9, Nauticam housing, Nikon Z 24–50mm f/4–6.3 at 29mm, Nauticam FCP, 2x Backscatter Hybrid Flash with 5500K flat diffusers, f/13, 1/160s, ISO 500)
About the Reviewer: Nicolas Remy is an Australia-based pro shooter and founder of online underwater photography school and photo club, The Underwater Club, with members in 18 countries. He serves as an ambassador for Nauticam and Mares, his work have been widely published in print and digital media, and his images have won over 35 international photo awards. To see more images by Nicolas and his wife Léna, visit their website, www.nicolaslenaremy.com.
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