Shooting underwater with Sony A6700

[gremlin]

I did some searching and did not find a thread related to this (there's one called A6700 Settings about video) so I thought it might be nice to create a thread for those shooting the A6700 to discuss best practices settings etc.

 

I'm shooting in a Nauticam housing with a Smart Turtle TTL Trigger I'm currently shooting with YS-D2 strobes and using either the 16-50 kit lens or the 90mm 2.8 macro depending on situation.

 

I've only done one trip so far with the setup (I used mostly the same setup with my a6500 from 2018, so it's fairly similar)

 

I usually start with TTL flashes as I find I get pretty decent results that way but if the critters aren't shy will switch to going manual as I can. One frustration I'm finding right now is there doesn't seem to be anyway to just turn off the flashes in the camera, and as such I can not in Program mode use the knob to shift the aperture/shutter speed values while maintaining exposure. (Going to the flash settings and selecting Off says it's not available in this mode) 

 

I'm shooting in RAW Mode, I select the Auto Underwater White balance as a starting place, and then am shotting in either Aperture priority or Program mode usually using a center balanced metering mode and a center tracking focus using the back button to focus at all times (I turn of focus on shutter). I tend to use focus peaking and DMF as my focus mode as it allows me to see when eyes are in focus a little more easily.

My other frustration is that with the 16-50 lens, on the A6500 in DMF you could hold the focus button down and move the knob that actuates the zoom and it would actually adjust focus, letting go of the focus button it would revert to actuating the Zoom, unfortunately on the A6700 they changed this behaviour and I now have the C3 button set to toggle between manual and auto focus modes so that I can manually adjust the focus (handy when I'm running a macro diopter on the lens)

 

 

[Lewis88]

At least on my A6100, if you turn on silent shooting, it will disable the built in flash. Not sure if that works with triggers as well.

[fruehaufsteher2]

The other way of disabling the flash is to switch to wireless flash. But the behavior of the flashes varies with the brand. 
 

The 16-50 is optically rather weak. We use the combination of 10-20/4 (the new one) with the 6“ acrylic dome. Hard to distinguish some of the pictures from the A7 IV with WACP-C. 
 

Macro-option is the only downside. 

Edited Monday at 09:15 PM by fruehaufsteher2

[humu9679]

On 3/13/2025 at 10:42 AM, gremlin said:

I usually start with TTL flashes as I find I get pretty decent results that way but if the critters aren't shy will switch to going manual as I can. One frustration I'm finding right now is there doesn't seem to be anyway to just turn off the flashes in the camera, and as such I can not in Program mode use the knob to shift the aperture/shutter speed values while maintaining exposure. (Going to the flash settings and selecting Off says it's not available in this mode)

 

 

 If you're in a hurry to turn off strobes, you might just pull the fiber optic cable. Usually I have enough time to turn off both if you're thinking about shooting existing light.

[gremlin]

I can turn off the strobes by just turning off the strobes, (easier than pulling the fiber optic cable) but that doesn't turn off the trigger on the camera, so the camera still thinks it has a flash and is limited to flash sync shutter speeds. 

As for the 16-50 yeah it's not the best lens, the 90mm macro is very nice, at some point I might consider changing to something better, but it's nice a versatile, I have a diopter for it and the WWL wet lens as well, making it easy to shoot whatever I find, I'm happy with the results.

[Chris Ross]

A Manual flash trigger might be a solution? If it doesn't recognise the trigger as  a flash then it won't restrict shutter speeds.  You could then point the strobes away till you want to use them again.  The Nauticam manual trigger for example allows the Olympus cameras to shoot at higher than flash sync speed this way. 

[gremlin]

Maybe, as I said above I really like to have TTL as well, so maybe there's not a solution that offers all of this, I'll have to play a bit more with the Turtle and see if I put it into wireless flash mode if I can do that.