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I'm really interested to betatest your plugin. Most of my uw photography collection is from Mediterranean dives.

Totally fair concern, and the right one to have before letting any new plugin near a real catalog. Short answer: yes, there's a preview-first workflow, Nomen doesn't overwrite existing keywords, and there's a feature to remove the IDs it wrote if you change your mind. Workflow: you select one photo or a small batch in Lightroom, trigger the plugin, and it runs locally. Before anything is written to the catalog you get a review dialog showing the top 5 matches per photo with confidence scores. You can accept the top match, pick a different one, or skip that photo entirely. Each match has an iNaturalist button that opens the species page in your browser so you can cross-check against reference photos before committing. Nothing touches your catalog until you confirm. On keywords specifically: it's purely additive. Matches go into their own keyword hierarchy (Nomen > Family > Genus > Species) so they stay isolated from whatever keyword structure you already have. Your existing keywords are never deleted or modified. If you decide you don't like what it did, there's an "Undo Nomen Match" feature that strips out everything it wrote to the selected photos, leaving your original metadata intact. My honest recommendation: start with a single image, then a handful, then a small trip folder. Running it against a 100K-image catalog on day one would be a bad idea with any new tool, not just this one. There are usage guides on the site that walk through a cautious rollout. I haven't recorded tutorial videos yet as the interface is still in flux. But you can see it working in the updates section of the site.

As I wrote in compact section...Great action camera but ... it will be retrocompatible with wet lens and other accessories?

Great action camera but ... it will be retrocompatible with wet lens and other accessories? This is a big problem

Could you post a video? I’m a bit worried about letting beta software start writing to my catalog, there is years of work there. Yes it’s backed up, but I still don’t want to test it. Do you select an image in the grid, click search, it fills to the metadata fields, then I can save that or discard it? Does it add to the keywords or replace them?

Posting with Tim's permission. Disclosure up front so there are no surprises: I've been building a Lightroom Classic plugin called Nomen that matches species in your photos and writes the metadata directly into your catalog. It will be a paid tool after the beta (lifetime Personal license is $29). I'm not here to sell it. I'm here because marine ID is the part of the tool I least trust, and this is the community that would actually know where it falls short. A bit about me. I'm a wildlife and underwater photographer. I recently got back into diving after a long break and I've been rebuilding both my kit and my catalog, which is what pushed me to finish this. My Lightroom catalog has six figures of photos across land and underwater work, almost none of it properly keyworded, and the gap between "card full of dive photos" and "knowing what's actually in them" is the problem I was trying to close for myself. What it does: Select photos in Lightroom, click Match, review the results. It writes scientific name, common name, a structured keyword hierarchy (Nomen > Family > Genus > Species), IPTC captions, social-ready captions with camera settings and location, star ratings for match quality, and color labels for confidence. Everything runs locally on your machine, no uploads, no cloud. The aquatic side covers 15 packs: fish (35,000+ species), sharks and rays, nudibranchs, corals and anemones, crustaceans, cephalopods, echinoderms, jellyfish, sponges, and more. There's a one-click "Select Underwater" option during setup that installs the full aquatic set. Dive region filters (Coral Triangle, Red Sea, Caribbean, Mediterranean, and others) narrow suggestions to where you were diving, and GPS from your photos is used automatically when present. When a match is close between two species, it flags both and lets you pick rather than guessing. What I actually need from this community: People willing to run it against their own dive catalog and tell me honestly where it gets things wrong. Nudibranchs, juveniles, regional variants, cryptic species, wherever you have expertise and suspect a generalist tool would struggle, that's where I need eyes. Feedback on the UW workflow itself. Not just accuracy, but whether this is a useful thing to sit inside Lightroom or whether it belongs somewhere else in a dive photographer's process. Opinions on which taxa or regions feel most underserved by current ID tools. I want to prioritize where the tool would do the most good. Beta testers get a lifetime Personal license in exchange for honest feedback. More important than testing, I'd love to hear thoughts in the thread from anyone with opinions on marine ID tooling, whether or not you want to try this one. Happy to answer questions here. If anyone would rather discuss privately, DM me. Mods, if anything about this post is off, let me know and I'll adjust. Brett

Well just went to Indonesia so drained my account all by myself 🤪

I had two transient, seal hunting PNW Orca's come right up to me and size me up for snacking about 10 years ago while I was on a safety stop. They sniffed but did not taste! I never saw them at all. Everyone on the dive boat could see everything and when I surfaced, I was like - What's going on???

...... or taste like one?

Hi Brett! Great to have you with us. A warm welcome to Waterpixels. If you're planning to build your u/w gear, you have sure come to the right place. We are experts at helping members drain their bank accounts for new, shiny toys! We hope you really enjoy the forum. Best wishes

Hey all, Brett here. I'm a wildlife photographer and videographer based out of Ontario, Canada, with a catalog that's grown past 100K frames over the years. Most of my time behind the lens has been on land, chasing birds and whatever else will hold still long enough, but I recently got back into diving after a long break and I'm hooked all over again. Trying to build the underwater side of my kit and my skills back up, and looking forward to learning from everyone here.

Hello Umiami05, I have a couple questions about the Ikelite strobes you are selling. Are you including chargers for the battery packs? I am also concerned that the strobes are at least a dozen years old and that battery packs lose capacity if unused for extended periods of time and you say no use except one dive trip after purchase in 2022? Can you provide more information about the age of the strobes and when that one dive trip was? I am looking to buy a used DS161 but maybe your DS160 might do. Divegypsy

Key Aspects of 8K30 Open Gate (2026 GoPro MISSION 1 Pro/ILS): Resolution: 7680 x 5760 (44.2 megapixels per frame). Sensor Usage: 1.0-inch Type 4:3 sensor (50MP). Frame Rate: 30 frames per second Vertical & Horizontal Simultaneously: It captures a much taller image than standard 16:9, making it ideal for creating vertical (9:16) content without losing significant resolution. Higher Quality Digital Zoom: Because the resolution is higher than 4K UHD (7680x4320), it allows for significant zooming or cropping in post-production while maintaining 4K quality. A few number of people would not need so many megapixels, especially in Video, for pictures anyone that want that 1:1 capture is nice to have all the detail available... Also the Micro SD card needs to be V60 or V90 to handle 8K Video, currently the fastest card available is the Lexar Play pro microSDXC express card with 900MB/s read and 600MB/s write (+-120€ Amazon for 500GB, or 5 hour recording ) V30 means 30 MB/s minimum sequential write speed, which is good enough for 4K video. V60 and V90 handle higher frame rates and also 8K video. 8K H.265 Open Gate (30fps) Storage Estimates: High Compression (approx. 200 Mbps): ~1.5 GB per minute / 90 GB per hour. Moderate Compression (approx. 300 Mbps): ~2.25 GB per minute / 135 GB per hour. This Gopro article should be updated when the new cameras arrived https://community.gopro.com/s/article/microSD-Card-Considerations?language=pt_BR

just out of curiosity - is diving with orcas safe? -or do you look too much like a seal?

Yeah, that sounds logical. Haven’t gone full scientist on this. In my short but sweet experience with Nauticam wet optics, comparing to 20+ years of domes with Tokina 10-17, Nikon 10.5, 10-24, Sigma 10-20 and a few others, it looks straighter (and obviously wider than a recti 10 with DX) to my eye at the wide end. But for sure, some curvature must be produced by the wet lens. Not sure if rectifying a fisheye with a diopter will be as good, maybe, but a little doubtful. Inme the wwl:s works great and looks good in the real world, inmo. Lots sharper all across than the any FF rectilinears behind huge crystal domes, and very easy and versatile to use. At the end of the day we shoot a system containing several pieces. Some really great lenses that are sharp as hell has proven to be very, very difficult to use UW because of that. Just focusing on the lens and assume that it is always best to buy the sharpest lens and build your system from that might not be the best idea for UW photography, inme. It’s fun to try new things, I encourage that. But it’s sometimes frustrating and can get very expensive. With poor results. So the premise of this thread is certainly true, but perhaps many times irrelevant for UW photographers.

No doubt the design could be tweaked, this one has worked well for me so far though, perhaps a material upgrade is enough in this case I don't know? Using this with an OM-1 you are a little limited as the nose of the "pentaprism" housing clears this gear by all of 1/2 mm. As noted by Gudge, this one was printed in PETG.

Center has never been a problem, it’s the overall image sharpness inme. One can (rightly so in many cases) argue that corners aren’t really that important, but in many cases they have been really awful even with super expensive top glass behind the biggest and nicest domes. I don’t know if the Sony lens you refer to has this acclaimed issue you mention or what effect it has in the real world, haven’t used it. I know there’s one good Sony 28-70, might not be the kit lens. Nikons z24-50 is certainly surprisingly sharp. I’ve used it. My only complaint would be its plastic and cheap feel feel. Here’s a test: https://www.cameralabs.com/nikon-z-24-50mm-f4-6-3-review/4/

Price drop - 1900 Eur

I've posted on this before, I don't shoot Sony so really don't care about the lens, but many people happily shoot with it. From what I understand the field of these lenses is wider than the stated focal length and the lenses have quite a bit of distortion and this allows room to correct the distortion and crop back to a rectangular image. Presumably the pixel dimensions of the image produced are the same as a lens that covers the full field of view so what happening is they are up-ressing the file and you are losing resolution across the entire image. I guess it's also possible that black part includes excess pixels that might be used for extra coverage when the sensor is moved about for in camera stabilisation where that is used, but you should see that in the pixel count. What I'm not clear on is if the vignetted image is is actually the same width as a regular 24mm image from a lens that doesn't use these digital tricks or they are short changing you on field of view as well.

This is wrong. The highly raved and recommended Sony 28-60 will not project corners @ 28mm on the image sensor and fakes this with digital lens corrections. Hence it cannot be as sharp (in the corners) as a lens that is not pitch black in this area. This was Initially complained about with the RF 24-50 Canon, but it’s not the only candidate suffering from black corners at the wide end. The Nikon 24-50 is likely to behave similar, though I have not RAW checked that one, yet. To me there seems to be a lot of bs out in the net, when underwater users of the Sony tell everybody how nicely sharp their 28-60 sony is paired with a water contact optic. It‘s true for the image center (but that’s with any lens) but not the corners on the wide end.

There's a typo in the table in the first post, there's no 8k 60p available in open gate mode. Hopefully an admin can fix it. Mission 1 Mission 1 Pro / Pro ILS 8K open gate — 30p 8K 16:9 30p 60p 4K open gate 120p 120p 4K 16:9 120p 240p FullHD 240p 960p (10-second burst) 480p (continuous)

I'll be shooting my Nikon 8-15 with a 1.4tc up in God's Pocket next week. I will share some photos.

I suppose a question might be if a very high quality fisheye like the 8-15 used with a teleconverter and "defished" can produce similar IQ in the corners to an equivalent FOV rectilinear?

Now that the n120 port extension is completed and passed its first deep dive, I wanted to create the n100 model. I made a 20mm n100 test print and it came nicely. The initial draft was made from some second-hand measurements which are rarely perfect on the first draft. I will borrow some n100 ports and a housing to refine the fit in the next couple of weeks.

There is always a better design available. I'd probably experiment with either putting a bridge across the top of those gear teeth, making sure it clears the housing sprocket, or put a thin wall behind them. Both solutions would not alter the inner or outer diameter and would significantly increase the strength of the part. Additionally, a chamfer around the base of those gear teeth could improve layer adhesion reducing breakage. Finally, using a stronger material like ABS in a printer with heated chamber would make it much stronger. The extensive stringing visible on the gear indicates that it could use some more fine tuning of the printer and filament, which could further improve the results.