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I use Sony C-AF (with tracking) all the time underwater, and mostly BBF. I could be mistaken, but I sense that BBF makes it quicker to acquire focus in tricky situations. On land I rarely use BBF, because the Sony ergs are not so good for that. In the end, it's whatever maximises your keepers.

Cocos Island in the Eastern Pacific is a dive destination my wife and I have been wanting to do sooner than later. While diving in the Galapagos several years ago I remember the crew telling us how devastating the last El Niño was to the marine life because of the abnormaly warm water. Does anyone have any thoughts or experience diving the Eastern Pacific ( Cocos Island, Galapagos or Revillagigedo / Socorro Islands) during an El Niño? Thanks

👍 By the way, as soon as I can get around to it, I will post a brief review on the forum of my testing of the Flexibuoy.

It works without the ring on the Marelux flip just as it would on a Nauticam flip. The $299.00 price is attractive as well.

Phil: Well, that all makes sense and was the question that no one seemed able to answer. In one of your shots you show an SMC mounted on the Marelux flip and sitting nearby is the spacer ring. I take it the NA lenses work correctly on the flip without a spacer? I was intrigued by the hydraulic aspect and that's what got me looking at this and interested in getting one.

You can get to most dive destinations in the South Pacific with a direct flight (or one stop in the Solomons for PNG) from Fiji. There are many options for affordable longer-term rentals around Nadi, often listed on AirBNB. There isn’t a local listing site here, but if you booked a week or two for a start you’d have the ability to look around and find a place that suits your taste and budget.

I agree that Retra really did a good job making the Maxi neutrally buoyant and it's a big advantage of their design. However, adding floats to the HF-1 does level the playing field a bit. Below is a set of photos with the Maxi strobe vs the HF-1 with my float design. As you can see, they are not wildly different. The HF-1 is about 12mm wider at the maximum, but shorter overall. With a float installed buoyancy of the two strobes is about the same. There might be an opportunity to make the HF-1 floats a bit taller and less wide with the same buoyancy.

Hi John, I am Marelux Senior Advisor and I can assure you that both Marelux and Nauticam in this case were wrong. I used the NA-flip with MX & NA C/U lenses until it broke on my last trip to Bali. Both NA & MX C/U and MV-60/MFO3 are in fact interchangeable between system flip adapters as well from both manufactures. They have different ways of making the spacers but both with respective spacers can also be direct mounted to ANY 67mm flat port. The newly designed Marelux double flip has the advantage of the Patented hydraulically balanced damping system which flips smoothly without sagging and has an optimized sealed rotating shaft which allows smooth rotation without jamming after thousands of flips. Photos shown are the Marelux Sony A7R VI housing with Sony 100mm macro port and double flip with Nauticam SMC-1 and Marelux MV-60. Also shown is the housing with MV-60 and MV-10 +10 C/U lens and the new double flip with the older style MX-single flip adapter.

guys ( @Architeuthis @Clifton ) , I am able bodied right hand male with Nauticam housing. So I am not talking about left handed big hands small hands... I am talking about situations where I keep my camera extended in one (right) hand and using external monitor (forget viewfinder or built in monitor for these situations) I am framing and executing the shot. Now think through how you hold your Nauticam housing and where your back button lever is and imagine holding the grip, using back button lever and executing shutter at the same time. Not going to happen. And besides since camera is moving respective to subject all the time one has to rely on C-AF anyway. Then all BBF issue is a moot point. At least in my humble opinion.

Marelux has just introduced the new double flip adapter to complement the Marelux MV line of wet lenses including the MV-60 and MV +5, +10 and +15 closeup lenses. The new Marelux flip adapter has a hydraulically balanced damping system, flips smoothly without sagging and has an optimized sealed rotating shaft which allows smooth rotation without jamming after thousands of flips. This is another Marelux (Patented Design). Additional information on the new Marelux flip adapter and Marelux MV wet lenses can br found in the Product section under Optics at Marelux.co The double flip adapter retails for $299.00 on the US site. Images show the double flip (and older style single flip) on the new Sony A7R VI housing with the MV-60 and MV-10 lenses.

I recently saw that Marelux has introduced their own double flip holder with a novel feature, for wet lenses. I am/was interested in this, and specifically, whether the Nauticam threaded spacer ring would be necessary to use Nauticam lenses like the MFO and SMC with the holder and if so, whether the standard spacer ring would work on the holder (it does not, for example, fit on an AOI or Saga holder; they require a different spacer). I contacted Marelux and half-expected them to say they had not tested Nauticam products on their flip holder, which would be understandable. Instead, they just responded to me with a link to the website product page and a note that I was "welcome to check." Perhaps mentioning I wanted to use Nauticam products on their holder was a mistake. I then spoke to a Nauticam dealer I deal with often, in case they had any info and of course, was told they had no idea about the Marelux product, which I pretty much expected. So I reached out to a Marelux dealer who also sells Nauticam, and asked about it. I was told the Marelux double flip holder only works with the Marelux brand wet lenses, which seemed odd, since all these products have a 67mm thread, but whatever. So I thought I would ask here in case anyone, perhaps Phil Rudin, could confirm what I was told or provide other info, mostly just out of curiosity at this point.

I love the mfo-3 on my 105 or on the olympus 60mm. Nauticam makes and overpriced "M82 Filter Holder for MFO-3" It allows the use of a lens cap and I use an 82 mm threaded lens hood on it at times. Of course, 3D printer experts like Dave Hicks could make something better.

I'm pretty sold on the Maxis - they are locked in on my spreadsheets!

Pretty much - avoid distortion, generally don't need a really wide rectlinier lens for archaeological work (unless you find an underwater city or something like that!). It looks like I can use the Nikkor 24-50 with a 180mm dome port or some quite short flat ports.

Some years back I read about and heard about BBF and how wonderful it was. All the cool kids did it, you know. So I set up my camera for it and did the back button thing for a long time. It was fine. It worked. I was able to coordinate my thumb and forefinger fine. But as time went by it seemed that although it was fine and worked, it did not do anything "better" for me and my style of underwater shooting. I began to wonder if it really made sense to use two fingers on two different buttons to accomplish what one finger on one button could do just fine. It also was not the most comfortable on some vertical shots. Maybe it depends on the camera or housing? I switched to using he shutter release button (well, the Nauticam lever) for both focus and shutter release. I am probably not allowed to have lunch at the cool kid's table anymore, but otherwise, I don't feel I am missing anything and I now have an additional, conveniently located button that I can program to do something else. Again, this is for me and for my style of underwater photography. I am not saying one way is wrong or right. Vive la différence.

I use back button focus for underwater photography, and decided to make the switch years ago during an Alex Mustard workshop. It takes a bit of getting used to it, but once you do, you will likely not go back to half shutter focus. For wildlife and landscape photography, I have re-programmed the nearby AE-Lock button (I shoot Canon) for spot focusing and eye tracking, and have found iit convenient to have the two focus options side by side, using my right thumb for both. As to the comments about human hand ergonomics, I can't dispute that. It's tricky navigating small buttons with one's thumb. Some underwater housings have made it a bit easier with larger levers on the back.

A little camera and a little housing just makes more room for what is really important, powerful strobes 🤣. The Maxi is smaller than the HF-1 with floats. And, since the Maxi is neutral, you may be able to use only a single float arm instead of dual float arms on each side. On another note, the Inon S220 strobes are essentially the same power as the older Z240. They are very close. And they are tiny, tiny.

OK, that is interesting. I assume that this means you need wide and not macro, and do not want fisheye-like distortion. If that is correct and size and weight matter, I would definitively look hard at micro four thirds because the small lenses permit smaller dome ports for rectilinear wide angle. There are a number of zoom lenses from Panasonic and Olympus that can be used as wide as 7-12mm range on the wide end (14-24mm in full frame speak) and all work in a 170-180mm dome, which large-ish but not unreasonable to travel with. You might even be able to use some in a 140mm dome if you can tolerate the loss of image quality. I never tried that combination. That same 170-180 port size could also work with some of the APS-C lenses form other camera brands. I am most familiar with Nikon and OM, so I don't have specific suggestions.

This is an aspect that people who unrestrainedly use and recommend BBF (like myself) overlook: everybodies hands as well as the construction of camera houses are different and do not fit together always... 👍 My personal situation concerned, when I take/took my Nauticam housings (EM5II/EM1II/A7R5) UW into my hands, the dumb is aready sitting rigth an the BBF lever and the index finger touches the shutter. It could not be easier and more relaxed... But what about left handed, different anatomy of hands or different housing manufacturer? Using AF together with shutter release requires a fine sense of touch in the index finger and also some practice: I am sure I would produce an enormous number of failures by pressing incidentially the shutter too soon...

Hi, does anyone use this with Nauticam housing? The port chart says to use N100-120 converter, extension ring 30, and 140mm dome. I have this exact set up for my other wide angle lens but when I put in 28mm F2 + fisheye converter combo I get vignetting on the outside. Taking out the extension ring 30, with just N100-120 converter and 140mm dome, I am able to get no vignetting. I'm curious if anyone else use this and can tell me if the port chart is just wrong, or if I'm missing something. -- For background, I took my gear to Mikomoto and Ito for the shark dives and did not realise I packed my Sony 90mm macro instead of my Canon 8-15+metabones+2x tele wide angle setup. In my defense they both had a black 3D printed zoom/focus ring on and somehow the 90 macro fits perfectly into the wide angle port urghhh. This 28mm F2 + fisheye combo was the only one that used the same ports and luckily I was able to pick up a used set in Tokyo for cheap. Curious to see how the quality compares - I would want the flexibility of the zoom setup for reef dives like Raja but I do hope the native lens combo has better auto focus for the shark dives... Took me until I was underwater in Ito shark scramble to realise... and even then I thought I messed up my zoom ring before I took it out and realised it was a macro lens... anyone else made such a silly mistake haha??

So M43 is still the most compact. A 12-35mm requires a 6"/150mm dome for stellar results. Even a 8-18mm requires a 180mm dome while in FF a 230mm is required for best results.

A not super-wide rectlinier lens is best - everything has been there for 2000 years so I can get as close as I want - I'm certainly not going to scare the subject away.

I used the Z-220 a long time ago (from 2008 to around 2010) and back then it was a good strobe for the price. However, what drove me to sell it after about three years was the fact that it was virtually impossible to snoot with the strobe because the focus light and flash tube weren't on the same optical axis. For me(!) that would always be one of the main reasons for buying a strobe – along with, of course, a few other features.