
Everything posted by MikeJonesDive
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Flexible setup for Fish Portrait through Macro?
I use Flat Ports and in reality you'd have to be a super pixel-peeper to see any real world image quality difference between flat port and a dome port on the 30mm.
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Flexible setup for Fish Portrait through Macro?
I second the above re 30mm macro has a happy middle ground. I often use my 30mm while carrying two wet lenses in caddies on my housing cross bar. An AOI UWL-09 wide angle wet lens and a AOI UCL-05 diopter. The 30mm gives me a fish-portrait style width and decent macro then I can add the diopter to the 30mm for closer macro. Then with a swap to the wide angle wet lens I get a FOV better for bigger subjects like sharks. It's the combo that covers just about everything. Many of the pics on my site were taken with the 30mm and wide angle wet lens. https://mikejonesdive.com/gallery The 60mm is a great lens but really no use for anything other than macro.
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A Field Guide to Sydney Harbour Fishes
Just released and a must for any diver coming to Sydney Australia, this book is the first to cover every known fish species from Sydney Harbour - more than 700 species! The book features over 2,500 colour photographs contributed by over 350 photographers along with maps and dive site listings. For all the divers who regularly explore our Sydney coastline and harbour this book is a must. Orders available https://sydneyharbourfishes.company.site
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Cuttlefish Over Reef
Giant Cuttlefish (Ascarosepion apama) Sydney, Australia ¹⁄₁₆₀ sec at ƒ / 8.0, ISO-200 Depth -10.0 m Temp 23deg
© Mike Jones
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Video library sorting/path/naming/ect/ect/ect
You can do this manually through the standard older system of your Mac FINDER but this is always going to be very clumsy. The better solution is to work through a particular software system that will automate file naming on import and allow you to categorise files in a variety of ways. Lightroom (classic) which is ostensibly for photos can also handle video files and it makes this process very easy. In the import settings you specify a naming protocol that will be automatically applied as Lightroom copies the files from your memory card onto your hard drive. For example each file might be labelled YEAR-MONTH-DAY-TIME which Lightroom will read from the file's metadata written by the camera. It can then automatically create a folder for each day and save the files inside. Then within Lightroom you can create virtual folders for whatever personal categories you want (favourites, different dive sites based on their GPS, and so on). You can have as many of these as you like, and clips can be place din more than one without ever disturbing the base level folder structure on your hard drive. HTH
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Editing - any value in a tablet and stylus?
Pen and Stylus does take some getting used to. They can be very fiddly in an untrained hand. A possibly better and more common solution is a form of dial or jog controller with short cut buttons (Shuttle Pro or XPPen make some good inexpensive options). https://contourdesign.com/products/shuttle-pro-v2 https://www.xp-pen.com/product/ack05-wireless-shortcut-remote.html
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Lightroom and Metadata
As a contributor to a number of marine science projects I've spent quite a bit of time wrangling my ever growing underwater photo collection into a functional database. And recently Ive had a few divers (and marine scientists) ask me about how to better use and modify metadata fields in Lightroom - things like species, depth, temperature, and relevant keywords. I've written up a short piece on how I make the most of Lightroom's database features and a couple of the very effective plugins I use to customise Lightroom for underwater pics. You read the full article via the link below. Hope it might be useful. https://mikejonesdive.com/lightroom-metadata
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Sydney Diver
Hi Folks. My name is Mike Jones and I'm joining from Sydney, Australia. I dive several times a week and am an enthusiast for marine biology and citizen science projects. My subjects are diverse - from muck-diving nudibranchs and seahorses, to off-shore reefs with Grey Nurse shark colonies. I keep an online gallery at www.mikejonesdive.com and regular posts on instagram @ mikejonesdive Cheers Mike