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Very interesting, but as praised, it is more a replacement of the old 90mm G lens, rather than a new, additional, option increasing the palette of available focal lengths. I see myself investing $$$$ for the new macro lens plus port (this time I will try to get the shortest N100 port available and use N100 extensions (in case doable)) and in the end I will have have, more or less, similar results as right now (90mm Sony macro lens with dedicated N100 port)...😁 (but who knows, maybe the new lens offers new exciting features, e.g. more native magnification, similar to 90mm lens + SMC-1?) Wolfgang

If I were to delete the worst photos of a dive, I would only be left with a couple or none at all. 🤣 Unlike the others have said, I only delete the clearly bad images, and for me clearly bad is totally out of focus, accidental triggers, etc. I like to have all the images with the specie tags on them, maybe an image is very bad but is the only photo of a specie that I have. Talking in consideration that the storage is quite cheap, I have a 12TB for the images (land and underwater), every dive or trip is a folder numbered by date.

I should go into business. I could sell a float collar for $50 and still make a $40 profit. Turns out my hourly rate is $0/hour since I retired. Obsolete and unemployable!

There was NA-A1 for sale on Facebook 2 days ago, but unfortunately its gone already, it was priced very attractively.

I reckon I take 80-100 images on a dive. Yep, after 25+ years, super ruthless. If it’s not a 3-4 star, it’s a delete. That probably gets down to 30-40% of the trip’s images. I usually do a second review about 72 hours after that cull and another batch will go to digital Valhalla. I now aim to end up with maybe 15-20images from a dive. Any doubts at all and it’s au revoir. What’s left is keyworded and filed by year and date all in Lightroom. This adds up now to about 55,000 images, almost 2TB. The catalog is on an SSD with a backup to a NAS and two backups to external hard disks. I did tackle the film images - slides - but foolishly scanned them as not very large jpgs. I should have done much higher quality or, better, TIFFs. I can’t face the rescan job! Ruthless. Why keep so-so? Are you really going to look back at them?

Out of curiosity, I compared the mounted dimensions of my 140 "curved port" + 25mm adapter, with as far as I can work out from the photos, the dimensions of the originally suggested N100 4" port #37122, plus the suggested 16mm extension. There is nothing in it, meaning the 140 is just as compact (if not more so) than the 4" rig. Plus the 140 may be slightly easier to light (i.e. getting the strobes correctly positioned) for extreme close-ups, and it doesn't place the lens further from the subject (appears to be slightly closer). So no need to chase the 4" port for normal FOV macro (say, 35 to 60mm).

I’ve forgotten to turn them on.

Your process seems pretty good. I would think trying to be ruthless at the front end of editing is the key to not being overloaded with rubbish. Your website looks great, by the way. Like Chris I toss out the clearly bad, out-of-focus, poorly composed or lighted images. I’ll keep a bad image if it’s a record shot of something I haven’t seen. I try to winnow down near duplicates, too. I use Lightroom storage, and images and videos are filed in folders by date, and key-worded by location and subject. I still have not tackled decades of film and slides. Sigh. One day.

No doubt it’s a big job. But if anyone can do it, you da man Dave.

thank you both for the extra information! I did not know that and it adds food for thought. I'll have to have more of a read about the video @Chris Ross I'm still leaning to the new R7 later in the year, but always good to have more options (sort of!)

On the why I expect it's to reduce the number of different housings they make, they have been trimming their port charts from discontinued lenses and dropping various adapters and ports as well. Possibly offering 3 different port systems (4 if you count the compacts) might be taking its toll. You could also look to other vendors, Isotta is about $2k cheaper for the housing for example.

You could also carve a whole float collar out of such material if you have the dimensions, just do the volume calculations if you know the foam density. It would need a steady hand with a hot wire cutter to make it neat though. Mozaik still list the buoyancy collar for WWL-1 for $92CAD and they ship out of Vancouver. You could also check them for the Stix collar. they seem to have a coupon code for 12% off - no tariffs. If you used the Nauticam buoyancy collar and assuming you are shooting stills not video you could take that weight into account with float arms

Most mirrorless FF cameras have some version of this as an option, you still however have to pay $$ extra for the housing and camera and need to check the fine print on how it does video in such a situation. If it's playing intermittently could be an issue with the RF-EF adapter or some sort of contact issue.

So I don't currently have the float collar. Looking at specs the lens seems to be about 600g negative without it which would be a rather significant print. The Stix 12 section collar should do it with some customizing, unfortunately expensive to get in Canada with the current tariff situation .

Perhaps, but first you have to find one and keep it alive. T here's no substituent for a proper AF fisheye IMO and a fisheye zoom is just so versatile, which is why people are mucking around with using Sony 2x on on an adapted Canon 8-15. With the Canon 8-15 being discontinued it means that even if it's replaced by an RF version it only helps CANON RF users and won't be adaptable to Sony. Nikon still seems to be making their 8-15 for now though.

I have been looking around at various foam options to make a float for my rig, a lot of places have the foam used for insulation under house slabs which is specified as high density and low water absorption and densities in the range of 30-33kg/m3. This means it has a buoyancy of about 970 kg/m3 or 0.97 gr/cm3. According to the page for the original WWL-1 float collar the lens is 160 gr negative UW with the collar. so it would need about 160/0.97 = 165 cm3 of 30kg/m3 foam. This is a cube about 5.5 cm or 2.1" on a side. If you can source some of this foam you could carve out a piece in the shape of an arc matched to the OD of float collar about 20cm long x 4cm wide and 2 cm thick and glue/screw it to the float collar you already have. With a bit of searching you could probably find a piece of the foam at an art supply place - it's used for sculpture, you would look for XPS foam with a density of 30-35 kg/m3.

I don't trim down by that much, but I'll throw all the obviously out of focus stuff, missed subject, accidental triggers etc and keep what's sharp and half-way well composed as Raw files and keep them in site specific folders. I'll also throw duplicates if I have lots of near identical shots. Process the selects to tiffs and jpegs to master folders . Eventually they make their way to my website where they are subject or trip organized. Nothing particularly scientific, but it keeps the storage requirements reasonable. My images library probably takes up about 2.5-3 TB in various folders. I have 4TB SSD storage drive and a conventional 4TB backup in an enclosure. It enough to keep 30+ years of images. I lost some scanned images quite a few years back during the process of upgrading PCs as far as I can tell, but the last 25-30 years worth of images are still there. My thoughts are that is the storage requirements are reasonable and it's organised enough to find an image with just a few minutes searching this is enough.

As far as I know just turn it on before closing the housing. I've seen people report the battery lasts a very long time. That's a very well used looking R5 though, my old 1DMkIV looks in way better nick.

After decades of digital photography it's "time to clean house". How do you decide what to keep? Not a professional, don't bother posting to Getty or Shutterstock anymore, might enter some photocontest for the heck of it. But mainly we go on a trip and I do a "trip video" 10-20mins for us. Then I will cut it down to 3-7mins for the website and Youtube. Lastly take maybe the best 10-15 images (out of hundreds if not thousands taken on a trip) and upload them to the Stills section of our website. I think I need to get back to "is this wall worthy".... Your process????

Very cool, Dave! You are definitely the master of printing that which others don’t make.

The port floats are big jobs, about 12 hours prints and use 1/3 of a KG spool. But once tested out, they are pretty easy to reproduce. So far, I just have designs for the 3 macro port configs I listed. I don't have a WWL-1 to measure.

Lovely if true. About damn time.

If @Dave_Hicks can make you one, I’d be inclined to go there. I just use the 1st version foam collar, and Stix floats on my arms (I have really skinny arms). Another thing that looks interesting is Marelux’s adjustable float bag: MareluxFlexibuoyFlexibuoy cheers. Craig

Aloha and welcome!

I've been experimenting with 3D printed buoyancy solutions for a while now. I've created a few iterations of a form fitting collar that snuggly fit over a 105mm macro port and add about 250 to 350 grams of buoyancy. It's a lot cleaner looking than a foam belt too. My first versions relied on painting with epoxy resin to seal it, but I've since been able to make versions without added sealants that stay watertight to 100feet over multiple dives. I want to keep iterating to reduce the dry weight and wall thickness a bit more before sharing. I've made prototypes for the Port60, Port87, and Port60+20mm extension. These have been especially useful to counter the added front weighting of a Dual Flip adapter with a couple of diopters attached. It should be very possible to design one of these for the WWL-1. I have a WWL-C, but it includes a built-in aluminum buoyancy collar.