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Oh yeah! They can be pretty amazing subjects.

Test results: Shooting a target at about 30 cm on my bench. Z8 f25 iso64 to get a good exposure at Maxi power 2. Shooting at 5fps at 2 or 2.5 the histogram slows walks to the left as subsequent images get darker. At power 1.5 on the Maxis the histograms are stable. Shooting at 4fps at power 2 the histogram slowly walks left and dims. Shooting at 3fps power 2 the histogram just barely walks left. It is basically stable at this speed and power. At power 2.5 is not much different, the histogram dims a tiny bit faster but not much. This is an area where I think the HF-1 is a bit better. It uses a different priority in rapid fire. It priorities exposure over fire-always. The Maxi always fires even as it becomes more and more dim. The HF-1 will skip frames and only fires at the expected power level. You get some blank frames but all of the ones you get are properly exposed. In this instance at power 2 or higher, with 10 frames the Maxi deliver a couple properly exposed frames then a run of increasingly dark images. The HF-1 delivers 7 properly exposed frames and 3 blank frames interspersed. Personally, i would rather have a sequence of properly exposed images even if a few get dropped. At least you get consistent images across a sequence that might span several seconds. * The Maxi at power 2 and HF-1 at 3/4 deliver the same exposure I hope that helps! I find 3fps is a good rate for me and delivers usable sequences at about half power on these strobes. You can always increase ISO and lower strobe power until find a frame rate that works for you.

Video lens test + Mission 1 pro AOI UWL-03 Wide Angle conversion lens Divevolk Macro Pro +18 Nauticam MFO (Midrange Focus Optimiser) lens Nauticam SMC3 (Super Macro Converter 3) lens

Yes you need gt-tune transform for ACES + free davinci version, grading is not so flexible if you have diferent cameras and shot with different settings.. Yes you need gt-tune transform to use DCTL + studio version (for ipad or computer ) ps: davinci Studio for ipad and davinci studio for computer are not the same .... On the M1pro i only use GP-LOG2 On the GP13 i use wide color gamut + flat.

If you have time to test the Maxis at power level 2 that would be awesome too. If the Maxis can sustain high fps at power levels 2 and 2.5 then that will help me immensely.

I have undertaken a lot of fish photography for scientific purposes. The problem is that a versatile set-up will work adequately but probably not as well as a more limited set-up, depending on subject. I find that I use a full frame camera and 60 or 100 lenses. IF type lenses are usually faster to focus, but again it depends. If you are wanting photos which are good enough to count fin rays and/or scales then your technique needs to be precise too and you are probably balancing depth of field with diffraction. I find on full frame f/11-16 probably offers the best compromise, and everything is starting to become a compromise when you are shooting fish which can move in any direction unpredictably, or are smaller than the dimensions of the format and the light and contrast are never as good as might be hoped. My fish 'system' of choice would probably be a decent MPixel camera (~25MPixels, maybe more) with a macro (90/100/105mm) and a flash with light which switches off during exposure. That said I've been successful with 60mm macro (I use a Nikon now as the 50mm Sony has not proven to be my favourite) lens too, and even an 18-35. It depends. This Jeffrey's Goby (~4cm long) was shot on a 60 macro in temperate seas off Scotland a couple of weeks ago - the elongated second fin ray confirms its identity and is the feature I needed to capture.

Many thanks - that would be hugely helpful. Jellyfish are always interesting subjects - do you get big Lion's Mane Jellyfish up there?

I will give it a try later this morning. Certainly 3 fps is no problem, which is my default setting. Last night I was shooting jellyfish much faster but only about 5 frames.

One other question - how many frames per second do you think that the Maxis could sustain at power level 2.5?

Thx - I think the same! Thx for explaining!!!

as a footnote, years ago I used to dive with a Nikon 35mm film body with a 60mm macro lens I now keep the lens at work in the drawer in clinic with an old d700 body to take pictures of patients - it still takes beautiful pictures every time I get it out I am staggered how heavy it is and equally staggered that I used to take it underwater in an Ikelite housing

My conclusion was that you should spend lots of money for some marginal improvement in some area of photography/videography.

Cheers - will do! I would have thought that they would have resolved the problem with newer cameras to avoid warranty claims and reputation damage but maybe not...

wow I though the original question was quite simple but this has turned into a technical pandora's box and I have been fascinated to read the replies I'm on a sony alpha 6xxx set up which is firstly portable and secondly cheap(ish) I have always presumed that if you are shooting with a dome, the dome becomes a part of the lens system and may well be the most important quality limiting step as most lenses, even cheap ones, are pretty good. The second thing, at my stage is that there are far more significant factors limiting image quality than sensor size (technique, experience and so on) but I posted the original question while I was wondering if going from alpha 6xxx to alpha 7 ff would make much difference. My guess is not... thanks for all the excellent replies

Consider me suitably warned!😀 I'm still researching tripods at the moment - not racing into a decision. I'm planning on using Helicon Focus for the software - is that one that you have used before?

Just a question about the sync speed of OM-1 with a simple flah trigger. Several users reported 1/400 flash sync speed on their Olympus camera combined with a Nauticam trigger. It appreared to me that with my Olympus-5iii and a Nauticam trigger, as well as with a Underwater Light an Magic trigger, 1/500 sync I also gives a full well lighted image. I'd like to know if the OM-1 (1/2) has comparable sync speeds. Did someone test this out?

don't say I didn't warn you. I have enough issues on land. What sort of tripod do you propose to use? The stacking software is good, but it has a steep poorly documented learning curve.

Don't believe so, this is hotshoe, there are 21 tiny contacts across the shoe, google probelms with Sony hotshoe and you'll get lots of hits.

Dear Fred, another thing you may want to consider for your grant money is a computer / workstation for image processing. I don't know if you are already well served for that at your institute, but image processing can become part of your routine - if you decide that it's appropriate. Using AI to improve image quality is certainly a difficult thing for scientific purposes. The borders of what's acceptable and not are blurry and also depend on the field of research (i.e. whether and how the community accepts these technologies). For cell biology, this is starting to become applied to improve signal/noise of e.g. fluorescence images, in particular before automated image analysis in "-omics" projects. But one has to be very vigilant that the "improvement" does not "iron out" true information or, in your case, introduce artifacts that you may count wrongly as a fish scale. Let your own judgment and gut feeling guide you as to how far YOU find this acceptable. Now, that said, AI processing can make counting scales a lot easier for you. I process my images with a program called ON1 photo raw, the also offer a Photoshop / Lightroom plugin for just the de-noising and sharpening. I wrote a tutorial about it on this site some time ago, certainly the tools from other software companies will be comparable. What can this do for you? Here's an out-of-camera jpg from last summer (Olympus E-PL5, 14-42 RII kit Zoom and Inon UWL-100 wide-lens without the dome): And here is the same image after processing: There's a bit more going on than just the sharpening / de-noising, but I hope the difference is visible even after the website has down-sampled this a bit more. The second picture will make it much easier to count the scales, but if you squint you can see them all in the camera-jpg as well. ON1 offer a free 30-day trial with full functionality (google on1 photo raw). You can try it out on photos from your current setup, see what this can do for you. It will work on both jpg and raw but obviously raw gives better results. If you try this out, you will see that you need a reasonable graphics card for your professional needs - otherwise it is way too slow. The GPU's are viciously expensive these days, so count ~3000 € or above for that workstation. This is a crop from the 16 Mpx M43rd sensor, the E-PL5 has the same sensor as the original Olympus E-M5 from 2012. Here's the full image (processed), limited artistic value but this is a technical discussion.

Great video and cool critters!

Looking forward to you testing it Phil, and seeing if you can get good corners and no vignetting! I can get one or the other, but not both, with the manual version, which is 185 degrees (140 dome, no shade).

First your housing floating, I always find positive housings to be annoying to use . You can get adjustable float arms from Kraken that allow you to get the housing perfectly neutral so it stays where you let go of it. Might be worth thinking about. Regarding cropping - do you crop as you can't get close enough or do you run out of magnification? The G5X covers 21x18mm field at max magnification and 67mm working distance with the CMC-2 The OM-1 covers 17 x 13mm at 1:1 with about 80mm working distance The Sont A7C covers 26 x 17mm at 1.4x and 90mm working distance So the Olympus 60mm gets more magnification on the sensor covering a smaller area at the same working distance as the Sony A7CR with the new 100mm macro. AF and finding subjects is easier with a proper macro lens compared to a zoom with a diopter. On the issue of latest models, yes there is a bit of FOMO, but from an image quality perspective, the improvements are incremental these days, comparing sensors from 15 plus years ago there are big advances but in the last 10 years improvements have come in readout speeds, computational photography and other aspects, rather than image quality measures. Improvements in noise and dynamic range are very much incremental, they are not non-existent but IMO not enough to choose one system over the other. By the sounds of your requirements, a macro is really what you need, many domes options allow you to get close and up 0.3x magnification, but the dome gets in the way for example trying to shoot a fish sitting on the bottom you have to shoot from above. If you are interested to look my website has a lot of UW images and there are quite a few fish of various types, you could look at this folder, all images are OM-1 with 60mm macro and select images with the MFO3. Australian Natural Images

Thx for your comment and explanation! About your question: The Electronic is 30 fps. Strobe should be 20 fps. Mechanical is 10 fps.

I'm thinking to buy DR21 studio version too. Do you need to buy also the GP-TUNE Transform in addition to GP-TUNE plugin? GP-TUNE TRANSFORM as DCTL? And last question: do you still use FLAT or GPLOG? Thank you Giacomo