Most underwater housings for cameras have a cold shoe AKA accessory shoe on them. In this blog I’m going take a look at the mount options available and what you can use them for. These should not be confused with hot shoe mounts which tend to have smaller fittings being designed for adding accessories to cameras that have a hot shoe for external flashes.
1” Ball Mounts
Probably the most commonly used cold shoe mount is a simple ball mount. These allow you to attach anything to the top of your housing that has a ball mount on it using a ball arm clamp. Underwater photography accessories that use a ball mount include focusing or video lights, strobes (underwater flashes), some GoPro mounts and of course ball ended arms. I regularly mount a focusing light on a cold shoe ball mount when I dive in lowlight conditions. I’ve also used a GoPro with a Scubalamp ball mount (£18) attached as an extra camera to record big animal encounters while my main camera is set up for macro photography and on a few occasions I’ve attached a small strobe with a short length of ball ended arm and two clamps to a cold shoe ball mount.
This is me with a GoPro mounted via a ball & clamp system to the cold shoe of an Olympus housing. I started doing this after a dolphin came to check me out on safety stop when I had a macro lens on the camera.
You do have to take some care not to overweight the mount or apply leverage to it or you can damage your housing where the shoe attaches to it. That’s more likely with plastic housings. Also it does happen some times that a ball mount may loosen during a dive and there is a risk of it sliding off, with whatever is attached going with it. I’d recommend using a small length of cord to attach your accessory to your housing to prevent that happening and also regularly check the mount is tightened. This advice applies to all types of mount not just ball mounts.
If you have a Nauticam housing you will usually have the option of mounting a ball mount directly to the housing using an M10 screw hole. This is more secure and sturdy in my view compared to cold shoe mounts and is what Anne has her focusing light attached to in this picture. A standard M10 ball mount is £35 and one with a lanyard hole is £42. Nauticam still give you a cold shoe mount to use as well so a mount you got for a previous housing may still be useable.
We sell the following cold shoe ball mounts: Inon Shoe Base Ball £45, Deepshots Accessory Shoe Ball Adaptor £26, Nauticam Strobe Mounting Ball for Cold Shoe £42, Nauticam Long Strobe Mounting Ball for Cold Shoe £47 and the DivePro Cold Shoe Ball Mount £29.95.
All do a similar job but due to the vagaries of underwater housing design not every mount will fit every housing. For example the Deepshots Accessory Shoe Ball Adaptor will fit the Fantasea housing for the Canon G9X but not their housing for the G7X MkII. If you contact us to buy a cold shoe mount we need to know which housing you have to match it to the correct mount.
YS Mounts
YS is a type of mount used on some strobes and lights. On the Sea & Sea YS01 and YS03 strobes it is fixed in place while it’s an option on larger Sea & Sea and all Inon strobes among others. The cold shoe mounts for this type of fitting have a flat section with a bolt hole which the YS mount on your accessories fits over.
These mounts don’t have the flexibility of ball mounts but are less expensive than them because you don’t need a clamp to attach the accessory to the mount.
The Inon Shoe Base II allows you to rotate the mount to change the direction your light or strobe is pointing and also the angle. At £35 it’s the cheapest YS mount option we sell.Unlike the Inon Shoe Base II which has a plastic mount the Nauticam Light Mounting Stem for Cold Shoe (£42) and Nauticam Long Light Mounting Stem for Cold Shoe (£47) have metal mounts but to my knowledge they don’t have the same range of rotation.
Inon’s little S2000 strobe on their Shoe Base Ball II mount makes for a simple option for lighting macro and close up pictures. Inon produce short fibre optic cables specifically for this type of setup.
GoPro Mounts
If you don’t need the flexibility of a ball mount system for attaching a GoPro to your housing, a simple GoPro mount such as the one we sell by Deepshots is much lower cost option (£15).
Tripod Style Mounts
If you want flexibility without the length that a ball and clamp system creates then Inon have created two specialist cold shoe mounts that might suit you. The catchily titled Shoe Base 1/4-20UNC (£64) has a screw fitting that fits any standard tripod screw hole such as those found on the bottom of most cameras and underwater housings as well as their own range of ‘masks’ and mount bases for GoPros, their light mounts for tripods and anything else with a tripod screw hole eg.a GoPro tripod mount. The Shoe Base M5 (£64) is very similar but has a screw that fits Inon’s current and previous strobe models plus their GoPro masks, cages and mount bases.
Inon’s Shoe Base 1/4-20UNC is basically a tripod head with a cold shoe mount and can in fact have the shoe mount removed to allow you to use it as a tripod head with compatible tripods.
Both these mounts have a tripod head style ball joint that gives 360º horizontal rotation and 180º front to back angle adjustment and they come in at less than the cost of most ball mount and clamp combinations.
Lens Holders
The other cold shoe mounts that seem to be fairly unique to Inon are the lens holders they produce. These do the same job as those you can get by various manufacturers to fit on strobe arms but fit on the cold shoe allowing you to forego strobe arms when shooting available light wide angle and still have the option to take your wet lens off and stow it to shoot smaller subjects. This is an ideal option for compact camera users who want to keep things small and simple. Options are available for 52mm (£50) and 67mm (£50) screw threaded lens and Inon’s XD (£44) and AD (£39) bayonet mount lenses.
This is the lens holder for Inon’s XD bayonet system on the cold shoe of an Olympus TG6 housing. Inon’s UWL-95S XD lens is a great option for use with the TG6 underwater, especially if you add one of the separate domes to it.
As mentioned earlier, when placing heavy and/or expensive items on a cold shoe mount it’s a good idea to regularly check that the fitting is tightened and add securing cord or lanyard to fix it to the housing in case of it slipping loose.
Thanks for reading this. Apologies for it being more sales orientated than some of the other blogs on here, but I’ve written this in part for customers who enquire about cold shoe mounts so that they can see all the options laid out.
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