Last month we visited Sunset House, Grand Cayman, just on the heels of Hurricane Dean. Thankfully the storm had passed well south of the island and the water was calm by the time of our arrival. The boats were out and, as usual, Sunset Divers treated us to another superb week of diving.

I brought the Nikon Coolpix P5000 camera and housing and found them to be an absolute delight to use. In fact, my standard dual-strobe digital SLR set-up barely even got wet! That's not just because the P5000 rig was much smaller and lighter to tote around. It also handled exceptionally well underwater, exhibited a much lower drag coefficient, and relieved me of my compulsion to perpetually tweak settings.

We enjoyed many sunny morning dives on the house reef, and I was thrilled with the P5000's performance using manual white balance and a UR/Pro color filter. This ended up being the perfect set-up for a stop at Stingray City on a clear day. Unfortunately there is still no filter to remove Sergeant Majors and Yellowtails from underwater photos.

These comparison shots were taken on a clear afternoon in approximately 15 ft (4.5m) of water:

Manual white balance was easily set by pushing just a couple of buttons in the camera's menu. The photo of the Atlantis submarine was also taken using manual white balance in about 60 feet (18m).

When attached to a Substrobe DS-125, the housing's iTTL conversion circuitry operated flawlessly whether shooting macro or wide-angle:

The TTL housing for the Nikon P5000 is available now. Stay on the lookout for the Coolpix P5100--Nikon's 12.0 megapixel successor to the P5000-- which is coming out soon!

Stubby, Dave & Larry had a ball testing beta-versions of our new Substrobe AF-35. This exciting new strobe with sensor is designed to be an easy and affordable system for any point-and-shoot digital camera. Good results are "automatic" as the strobe watches the output of the camera's flash for proper exposure. Our test strobes performed very well and we're looking forward to releasing the AF-35 kit within the next two months.

Overall we had a great trip and a lot of fun testing new gear. Special thanks to Mike Pinnington and the Sunset Divers crew: Rob, Pete, Jackie & Mike B. Thanks as well to Dee, Keith, and everyone that keeps Sunset House running so well (including My Bar staff)! See you in December!