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I think these days modern sensors are so good as long as you don't badly clip your image it doesn't matter , many sensors are ISO invariant and tweaking up exposure is no different to raising ISO in camera. Where it does help is in judging you haven't had too much flash as increasing exposure in post brings up flash as well and you wouldn't see it necessarily when reviewing the image when UW. But again if you have a histogram like shown above in my post you are not blocking shadows or blowing highlights and in fact you are only using 60-70% of the available dynamic range, so a high dynamic range camera does nothing for you. Stretching this histogram out with a levels adjustments maps the brightest pixel to just below clipping and dimmest pixel to just above blocking up and the contrast comes up and image is 90% of the way to being the finished product. So underwater all you do is expose to approximately centre the histogram and don't overdo the flash. What is happening is the strobe is not really brightening up your subject but adds enough reds that you can successfully pull the colours up and get a decent white balance. So in effect it's an ambient light shot with some warm colours added into the mix which enables you to achieve a satisfactory white balance when you adjust everything. Forget about balancing WB on the water vs the subject, you are not going to achieve deep tropical blues, but it will look OK. The other thing is that you'll only light up a 4m wide section of wreck or so at most with your strobes on the best of days so you are effectively shooting ambient light and colouring up some foreground objects with the strobes.

If you are proposing to do this UW - good luck!, I do a lot of focus stacking macro on land and anything but the stillest condition will make it near impossible, then your strobes need to keep up and there will be limitations on how fast you can shoot. You need to solidly mount your camera then rack it in and out to get the near point in focus then guess how many frames you need and give it a try and then check that the last the frame gets the most distant part you want in focus. Then you do all that and get home and find that you missed on getting the closest bit in focus as it was another part of the object that was actually closest and you go back and try again. I use an external monitor and magnify the image 2x on it to check the focus point for the start of the stack and again the check I got full coverage. Underwater - no thanks I'm not that much of a glutton for punishment.

I would suggest that these days there is little to pick between sensors in UW cameras you can either have a 20-30MP FF or a higher pixel count in the 45-60 MP range. Pick your poison in MP count then look rather to other features like flash sync speed, and the range of available lenses as well as housing support from various vendors. Also important is battery life, can it charge over USB through a bulkhead? what is flash trigger support like, all practical things that make life easier living with an UW housing. If you are looking at Nikon vs Sony in Nauticam that means N120 ports for Nikon and N100 ports for Sony. Practically speaking the N120 port range is not as good as N120 and you can end up needing an N100-N120 adapter (not cheap for Nauticam - but then again neither are their N120 extension tubes these days. In Isotta they both use N120 ports. Personally I'm not a fan of the Sony flash hotshoe it's a known weak point with lots of fine contacts which give connection trouble periodically, there have been a few people on here having issues with their hotshoe as I recall. Beware of paralysis by analysis though - just setup a costs spreadsheet to get what the lens types you want to use housed and UW and compare costs.

I was looking reasonably solidly at getting a Nikon Z5ii, however @Grantmac has pointed me in the direction of Sony - and know absolutely less than nothing about Sony's cameras. I've taken a quick look at their range and on first glance there seems to be little logic as to price vs performance & features of Sony's range. The a7 V seems to be the closest to the Z5ii in price and seems to be the best Sony camera to compare to the N5ii - but I could be wrong. I will be frank -- coming from 35mm film with a 30-odd year break - I have no idea what most of the terms in the specs even mean - which makes it very hard to understand the specs or compare a Z5ii to a Sony a7 V Is anyone using a Sony a7 V?

This is what i found out when researching to use the z 24 f1.8S prime with the wwl-c. Front element apparently ”too big”. But haven’t seen anyone test it.

Welcome! Lived in TC for a couple of years. Love MN.

Cheers once again, and the Z5ii does indeed have the same battery as the Z8.

@ColdDarkDiver Could you perhaps reload those images as .jpgs?

I'll play :) (in good fun - I appreciate what was in this post - but will provide my experience). So - yes and maybe? My take on this is that you want to use just enough light to light the subject but without blowing out the water but getting the depth of color that it has. ISO is critical. By doing this - and maximizing the dynamic range captured by the camera so you can bring it all together in post (if you need to) but you still need the light to bring out the colors that will otherwise be lost. Under and over exposed means you can bring it back if you need be with the latitude of modern sensors, but using everything the shot has is ideal. I find that the most important thing in murky water (which I know and love) is that one has to adjust their strobes for each shot to only light the subject and no more. In clear water, set and forget and it is fine, but in murky it is a constant movement of strobes in, out, angled out, angled in - for each shot to overlap just what one wants lit and as little water as possible. It is set by distance to the subject more than anything else... which also means adjusting power output. I also think that white point and black point setting is really important, but touching on the importance of all the dynamic range that is good, I thought I would add a few examples. These are all straight from camera - R5 (which is pretty solid dynamic range). I'm including the histogram (untouched) to show the need to expose the background and it is not only black and white point setting. Canon R5: Straight from Camera: I used all the dynamic range and it is the darks that make this something intriguing - and this is ISO 1600 - f13. Or - Kelp experience (I'm cheating here since this was ISO 100 since I was shooting sun but i think it shows how we are still using all of the dynamic range available) (Ok this one I cropped but I didn't impact the histogram with it but as shot - it exposed the background and lit the foreground while capturing all the light and information possible).

Burst shooting does not seem to be a problem. I've shoot a few thousand images while shooting birds at 12 fps and not had an issue.

Hi Areintheocean! A warm welcome to Waterpixels. Great to have you with us, Yep, if you lug 50lbs of camera gear around the world, you've come to the right place! We hope you enjoy the forum. Best wishes Tim

I'm going to experiment with Focus Shifting/stacking for macro which can mean shooting 150+ images in a burst so I will see if the Z5ii has the same battery as the Z8.

I'm a travel diver based in Minnesota and stumbled upon this site upon recommendation from a friend. I never thought I'd be the guy lugging 50lbs of camera gear around the world, but I'm thrilled that it's the point of nearly all of my vacations. I only wish I had started photography sooner. I'm currently shooting Olympus cameras with AOI housing and sea and sea strobes. I post my pictures to instagram under the name: Airintheocean A fun play on words beings that my name is Aaron. Its a public account so feel free to take a look. I'm looking forward to the forums to learn and see what you all have to share.

Battery life has not been a problem with the Z8. I've done 3 dives and 500-600 photos and not dropped below 25-50% power many times. I don't know if it has room for an external battery, but I expect you could add a USB bulkhead for charging in the housing.

Slightly off-topic but - does your Nauticam Z8 housing have room for a powerbank to give your system longer battery life? I know that some Nauticam housings do (or did) but I don't know which ones.

LOL! I will try to keep the history lesson short😄 Initial maritime trade from Egypt to India took place initially over a period of several hundred years and started around 250 BC but possibly earlier. In 30 BC the Romans conquered Egypt and then that opened up trading routes from Rome all the way to the west coast of India - and possibly further. Essentially the Romans sailed goods across the Mediterranean to the Nile, then omn smaller boats they were transported down the Nile, and then carried overland to various ports on the Red Sea coast where they were then loaded onto a fleet of vessels that all sailed at once each year to catch the monsoon winds to India. They then did their trade and bartering etc while waiting two months for the winds to change to enable them to return to Egypt, and the goods that they obtained from India were then sent up the Nile and across the Mediterranean to Rome. Altogether there are four known shipwreck sites from this period although given the vast number of ships sailing the route during the Roman period there are no doubt more to be discovered. Two of the sites consist solely of scattered amphoras, one site has some timbers from the bottom of the hull and some scattered artifacts, and then there is the site that I discovered in 1991. From the style of its cargo of amphoras we have been able to date the wreck as somewhere between AD 10 & AD 30 - so basically 2000 years ago. Because the Red Sea waters are low in oxygen below about 35 metres, the hull of this vessel is intact - the timbers are still solid etc. We haven't done any testing of the timber yet as currently the archaeology permit does not allow us to raise any objects, but we believe that the timber is mahogany, which along with cedar has been used in shipbuilding in Egypt since at least 1500 BC, the mahogany and cedar came from Lebanon. So this wreck is the only known intact wreck from the period of maritime trade between Egypt and India - and so historically it is quite important as we don't know a lot about the maritime aspects of that trade. We do know that the demand from the elites in Rome for exotic spices and silks etc from India was so great that it nearly sent the Roman Empire broke! Given that this ship was loaded with amphoras which probably contained olive oil and wines, this ship was loaded with an outbound cargo destined for India. Just up the coast a little is where the Egyptians launched the Expeditions to the Land of Punt some 3500+ years ago - if we were to ever find a wreck from that trade then it would epic!

OK now, around here you can’t just drop a statement like that, the peanut gallery demands more info! At least give us some hints - please!

The argument here is you need high ISO as you are relying more on ambient light - basically the strobes are turned down to avoid blowing out the water. The real solution to this flat low contrast image is to set your black and white points - here is the histogram of an under flashed ambient light image: and here is is the adjustment in a levels tool: Now the difference this makes is quite significant, this is just a throwaway shot, but it is under flashed in murky water and it shows what happens when you set you white and black points properly- the LH side is out of camera, the RHS only has levels adjusted and shadows boosted a little: There's more that could done to fine tune things, a standard curves tweak, a bit of fine tuning the WB, brightness, etc, but what we are doing with this shot is compensating for the low dynamic range in the scene. The time taken to do this is way less than explaining what has been done, you just grab the white and black points on the histogram and drag them in. Higher dynamic range will make no difference at all to what is going on. It's not that you don't get the benefit of high dynamic range - it's that you don't need this benefit. As an aside you can also do your colour balancing with this tool by adjusting the black/white points on each individual channel.

If you stay within the Nauticam eco-system, this is mostly true however there are some examples I can quote: First a Sydney diver using a D850 wanted to downsize, they went I think with a Z5 camera. The Nauticam housing was the same size and weight as the Seacam for the D850, however the Isotta housing gave significant size and weight savings as it is much more compact in the way it is laid out. Second as recently discussed on here the Nauticam Z5II/Z6III housing is significantly smaller and also cheaper than the other Z series housings. The first Nauticam Nikon(and Canon )mirrorless housings were a lot larger partly as the set the camera back further in the housing by the thickness of Z-F converter so the F mount lenses and their zoom/focus gears would work with the same extensions as they did with the F mount cameras/housings. The new style housings accomplish this by using a Z-F adapter with it's own zoom gear so that the F mount lens zoom gears will work and you don't need to buy new ones. You still have the large ports and extension rings etc and the big lenses but the housing can be made smaller.

As I recall Nauticam stated that they used the 28-70 kit lenses from Ca-nikon as they had the required entrance pupil size and that faster f2.8 zooms wouldn't work because of their larger entrance pupils. A few people stated that a 52mm or smaller filter size was about the limit for lenses that worked with the WWL-1. It was also speculated that the limitation was related to the size of the rear element of the wet optic the flat port in the case of the WWL-1 or the rear element of the WACP series, which seems to imply a geometric limitation in getting the light bundle from the wet optic into the lens front element. See this from Massimimo on his website for example: https://interceptor121.com/2023/03/11/nauticam-wwl-1-on-sony-full-frame-what-to-expect/ All of this is somewhat speculative, but I have yet to see anyone who has posted "I put a 28-xx lens not on the list behind the WWL or WACP and this is what the images looked like" or similar posts. So we just have these bigger lenses are incompatible but no real reason why and no one has tried done behind one of these wet optics and published what they found at least I don't recall seeing any such posts. Some examples might include will the EF 28-70 f3.6-5.6 lens work behind a WWL-1 on full frame or will a 24-70 f2.8L lens work behind a WACP-1, the question has been asked but I don't recall seeing anyone posting what the result is if you try it.

There are some examples coming out on FB now Andi Voeltz shared some using the 20-50 F4. Pasting one image here (mods - please remove if violates rules - It is pretty clearly branded so gives credit to photog). Looks promising! Can't wait for more images - and I would be really happy if a port like this worked with a lens as nice as the 20-50 (or any L lens for that matter).

Just an update on my progress: I ultimately went with the UWTechnics 11032-HSS. I tested it today using the Retra profile (set to 7) with the Retra Pro Max, and M mode, TTL, and HSS all worked properly. I also did not encounter any black bands caused by flash-sync timing issues with the camera. Anyone having the same issue as me should consider upgrading to a better trigger.

Second, updated edition. Blennies of the Mediterranean Sea introduces readers to one of the most fascinating groups of small coastal fishes inhabiting the shallow waters of the Mediterranean. The suborder Blennioidei, with about 880 species worldwide, is represented in the Mediterranean by the families Blenniidae, Tripterygiidae, and Clinidae, whose members display remarkable diversity in form, colour, and behaviour while living closely associated with rocky coastal habitats. In this second, revised and updated edition, Francesco Tiralongo expands the guide by including additional species, both alien and recently described by science, reflecting the rapidly evolving knowledge of Mediterranean fish biodiversity. Supported by colour photographs and detailed hand-drawn illustrations of diagnostic characters, this book provides clear and reliable tools for species identification, making it an essential reference for ichthyologists, divers, fishermen, and all enthusiasts of Mediterranean marine life.