bghazzal

Bienvenue / bem-vindo à toi, Nuno Looking forward to seeing your pictures of Marseilles waters these days 👌

A fascinating project, and the quality of the footage and the way it is used is really something else. Looking forward to seeing the full finished work 🤩

Yes, i would stay away from integrated batteries on budget lights - it's just a big leap of faith to to trust budget Chinese brands on batteries - last year I bought an LED fishing lure light for bonfire dives from one of the biggest manufacturers in the country - they sell 4 different models, all with integrated batteries, but the wattage/lumen/burn time is no where near the specs given. I can't check the battery pack with out breaking the light. This maker's lure lights are rebranded and sold in different countries. Another issue with cheap video lights is the quality of the reflector - a 120° "wide coverage" beam is generally presented as a plus, when it is actually something of a design defect - if possible, you actually want a tighter beam (say 90°, 100° angle...) as this will simply give you more more light for a given lumen output. As often stated on the forum, for the same lumen output a 90° beam angle will give roughly twice as much light falling on the subject than a 120° beam. And in a real-life shooting situation with the typical 2-light setup used in UW videography, two 90° beam lights will actually provide full coverage for lens with less than a 130° field of view (which goes for action cams, rectilinear lenses and WWL/WACP type lenses etc...). The Hydras i use have a 100° beam, and I'm happy with that. Most Keldans have a wider beam, but I'm guessing reflector design makes up for that - in general wider beam reflectors cost less than tighter beam ones.

Nitescuba is operating in the same OEM / ODM space as SUPE/Scubalamp/Fotocore/Divevolk - and it's not really a brand-per se, more a branding of similar products which you can find of Aliexpress or elsewhere in their case. I've had some rather sketchy experiences with these (see here ) so stay away if i can for electronics like lights (but would consider them for a less sensitive products like float arms or a monitor housing - last nightscuba product i bought was a mounting stick for remote lighting but it arrived branded as something else). I really wouldn't trust OEM-ODM maker's lumen, CRI, or burn-time specs... Since you seem to be ok with non-constant output lights (ie ok with buying lights that will constantly dim as they're used rather than provide a set power level), I would look into actual Chinese brands like Big Blue, Orcatorch or Archon, which have been around as such for a few years and tend to have an ok track-record (though the specs are still on the fantasy side). Seafrog/Meikon's new lights are interesting, but rather untested. As a side-note, if CRI / light quality is really important to you, I would definitely focus on the upper Chinese tier brands like Weefine or Kraken (and potentially Kay Burn Lim's new Subnox brand). They are really a knotch ahead in terms of general quality / quality control. Though design on these still suffers from Chinese R&D teams not really understanding how these products are used in real life shooting situations (button ergonomics, or adding questionable whistles and bells that many serious users could do without), at least there seems to be a some sort of feedback chain and some practical improvements on recent models.

I worked on Digurah and yes wouldn't recommend it for snorkeling - main snorkeling event is really snorkeling with the whalesharks, but it's basically trying to keep-up with a swimming whaleshark (and they are fast), and not really suitable for kids. To be honest, it's not something I enjoyed facilitating when i was was there (too much chasing, hectic, too many boats dropping people too close to the sharks), so I'm not the best person to sell this to you. Diving is good with easy access to thilas like Kudara thila, and a manta cleaning station, quite a few grey reefs and sometimes the odd silvertip. Not much of a house reef or land access. La Paz (where I've also worked) would have been a good choice for the California sea lions and also whalesharks later in the year etc, but it's far and you're off-season (Los islotes is closed during mating season in August), and yes, it's far. As suggested, Magdalena bay is really in a category of its own, but check the season. Palau is doable - especially combined with seakayak tours or stand up paddle, but most of Palau's main sites are not the best for snorkeling. Still a good option, but keep in mind that all the action is on the Rock islands, and there's not much in water action around Koror, and no real beach other than PPR's or artificial beaches. I loved the diving when I was working there but have mixed feelings about snorkeling. But yes, you can see mantas snorkeling at German Channel or reef sharks in the Rock islands (there's been some feeding going on around one of the main resting areas on a specific island so lots of blacktips) or snorkel the dropoff or Cemetery / Paradise reef. If you can drop the big-animals requirement (or lower it to reef sharks, turtles and cephalopods), you can find places with excellent snorkeling and diving. Land-based central Raja-Ampat for instance, or Komodo NP in Indonesia. It's probably changed a lot but snorkeling around the Dampier peer house reefs used to be be incredible, as were some islands with resorts just outside the Komodo national park like Kanawa or Sebayur. As others have suggested Bali is still a good option, with mantas on Penida, as is Bunaken if turtles and coral are enough.

Bienvenue à bord 😃

have you looked into the new Backscatter Octo 3500 Wide video lights? They're listed as $300 USD here: https://www.backscatter.com/Backscatter-Octo-3500-Wide-Underwater-Video-Light 3500 Lumen Brightness 100º Wide Even Beam - Light Scenes with Wide Angle Lenses Three Power Levels Compact Size - Perfect for Travel Backscatter Color Filter System Compatible Enjoy the vivid colors of fluorescence with the optional Backscatter Video Light Excitation Filter Powered by two interchangeable protected 18650 batteries Simple Single Button Control 5000K Color Temperature CRI 90 Triple O-ring Seal

Snorkelling is indeed especially difficult, as you are close to the surface and affected by waves and surge. For snorkelling / surface work, most people find that it helps to have the housing negative. For diving, close to neutral or slightly negative is usually the sweet spot, as it avoids having to compensate buoyancy with muscle power. You can customise this by experimenting with floats in a bathtub, keeping in mind that salt water will be a little more buoyant. But there are 2 really important aspects: trim/balance and bulk. You want your housing to be balanced/in trim so you don't have to fight against it when filming, it shouldn't tilt one way or the other, up or down. And bulk helps a lot, a bulkier, yet compact rig will be more stable than a smaller or less concentrated one. Look at cinema camera housings for inspiration. The rest depends on your own personal buoyancy control in the water. Hope this helps

As a belated update, it would be worth looking into Seafrog SF150 lights to confirm they are constant output, as they seem to be - if it is indeed the case, they're hard to beat budget wise: https://www.seafrogs.com/npublic/opdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=https%3A%2F%2Fomo-oss-file110.thefastfile.com%2Fportal-saas%2Fpg2024061210334464153%2Fcms%2Ffile%2Fsf-150%20video%20light%20user%20manual.pdf

Nando, I feel we have already had this discussion. Quoting places I have worked at and attempting to use that to discredit what I write is not a counter-argument. It does not address the substance of the technical points being made. If you are diving in an environment with no ambient light, or shooting closeups or macro then shooting in ambient light is not really an option. That is self-evident. However, this does not invalidate what I have written on ambient-light shooting. It simply defines the limits of a specific environment and/or shooting style. And please note that there are specific approaches for shooting ambient in greener waters, including filters specifically designed for greener water (magenta filters), that you have not tried or meaningfully experimented with. On that basis, dismissing filters, or generalising from your own specific shooting conditions to everyone else, is simply not justified. Closer to your home base, I have dived and filmed in ambient light in the Mediterranean. While I do not currently have access to that action-cam footage, which is archived on my hard disks in France, shooting in ambient light with filters is entirely feasible there - I did so in 2016 last, on a GoPro4 at the time - and yes, I used a filter. I cannot show you the footage, so you'll have to take my word for it, but I was primarily diving Port-Cros, including sites such as La Gabinière, which should be familiar to a European diver like yourself. I was shooting mérous (groupers) bécunes (local barracudas) and topography mostly. Far from the tropics, but certainly possible. Filter or no filter, people also shoot successfully in ambient light or mixed-lighting in Spain (Costa Brava) and in Atlantic locations such as the Azores and Tenerife. Conversely, to return to my home turf, if you are diving a 51 m wreck like the Donator, or training in quarries such as Bécon-les-Granits, to site locations I have also dived or trained at, then artificial lighting is clearly the correct approach. The same applies to diving in Brittany, night dives, or... your locale apparently. This is not disputed and never has been. The issue is not whether lights are sometimes required. The issue is that diving in conditions where ambient light is not viable does not justify dismissing other valid approaches to ambient light shooting. When you make statements such as “I would not go the filters route… dive lights + GoPro Labs gives you much better results” conflate your personal constraints with general principles. An accurate framing is actually straightforward: in your diving conditions, shooting in ambient light is not an option, and you therefore prefer close-up shooting with lights. That is exactly what you are doing, and well, good for you, but don't use this to discredit something you do not do or have experience with. Regarding your comment that you do not see people using filters, I think this also reflects a widespread lack of understanding of how filters are used correctly, for best ambient light results. That knowledge gap is precisely what we are trying to address here, for people interested in approaching this effectively and experimenting further with it, and one of the reasons I wrote the article, for people interested in experimenting with this approach before drawing conclusions. And again, if BBC camera operators use filters in specific ambient light shoots (and/or mixed lighting) on cine cameras shooting in actual RAW - and no, not only in tropical blue water locations, well, it is not because they are behind current technology, but because there way to do this effectively, and, more importantly, an actual reason to do so. It is also incorrect to treat lights and filters as mutually exclusive. Using ambient filters on lights, combined with a lens filter to achieve a proper ambient-light white balance with supplementary artificial lighting, is an established and actively researched approach. Keldan’s approach is a clear reference point. Again, there is a way, and a reason, to do so. All and all, I think it is important to situate one’s experience accurately. Limited exposure or understanding of a technique simply does not confer authority to dismiss it like you do, and you should be mindful of this when giving advice. As an example, just recently, you were dismissing Log shooting because you were unaware that it must be converted to be graded properly, a point that had to be explained to you in this forum. This is similar. Furthermore, consuming large amounts of YouTube or similar content does not substitute for a practical, experience-based perspective. I strongly believe that technical claims such as the ones you make should be supported by your own demonstrated results, rather than being backed primarily by references to influencers or online content, which you often post as justification, including in the replies above. In this, I would join the suggestion which has already been made to you to on the forum to stop posting loads of videos of variable quality to justify the points you are trying to make. Instead, it would be much more interesting to show us how you, Nando Diver, are incorporating what you are learning here and there and how it helps your underwater videography, what results you are satisfied with, and why. Especially if you are going to make affirmative claims and offer authoritative advice, as you quite often do, then please show us the goods so that we have something concrete to discuss, rather than indulging in pleasing but ultimately disconnected speculation, which is often what purely theoretical technical content amounts to. Anchor your advice in your actual experience and use your own footage to support it. Based on what you have shared so far here and on your channel, your footage is predominantly close-up work under artificial lighting. That is entirely valid. As a side-note-, while I write a lot on shooting in ambient light on action cams, as this is what I was primarily doing the past 10 years, I primarily shoot with artificial light myself, as illustrated by what I post here or on my channel. However, this specific background does not qualify you to make authoritative or dismissive statements about ambient-light shooting on action cams, particularly on approaches you have not even attempted to experiment with. Beyond your local conditions, which are unusually restrictive and do not necessarily apply to the original poster, there has been little meaningful experimentation with alternative approaches, including ambient-light shooting during trips such as your Red Sea dive trip, which offer excellent conditions for ambient-light work for instance. This is not intended as a personal attack. If anything, it is a call for greater precision, humility, and personal investment when discussing technical methods on the forum, so that we can offer something more constructive than the volume of average or outright misleading information found online, especially on YouTube. All this to say I stand by everything I have written, including regarding GoPro Labs. The tweaks you are experimenting with do not replace a true manual white balance performed at depth, or the effects of a well-designed spectrum filter. It just does not function this way. Shooting in RAW or Log, or applying GoPro Labs parameters might certainly be useful tools, they do not magically suspend physics. Let's leave it open for the OP to gather information, experiment and decide what works best for him, before locking him into a ready-made solution. And lastly, while “good enough” may indeed be good enough for some, it is not a reason to settle for it simply because it is easier. Let’s leave that to the talking heads who produce more talking-head videos than actual underwater content worth engaging with. There is already more than enough of that around, and it would be good if this forum could remain a place that offers a constructive alternative. cheers ben (ps - sorry to the OP for the off-topic slide, forums can be as slippery as a well-oiled eel...)

bottoms up! 👽 🍻

Look into Kraken (Hydras) or Weefine lights - also, importantly, they're constant output

Since we are being authoritative, for underwater landscapes and true wide angle subjects, and for shallow dives, I would actually forget lights. I would also recommend going down the filter route for actual wide angle work on action cams at diving depths. Reason is that the field of view on action cams is extremely wide, and your lights will be largely ineffective for anything more than about 2 m from the camera. And sunlight will overpower your lights in the shallows. So I would save those lights for medium and close-up shots, deep and night dives, but forget about lights for wide-angle. The key is to shoot in a flat profile (log), and to set your white balance point in post. This approach is a tried and tested way which will give you much better results than any in-camera tweaking, including GoPro Labs customisations. And yes, using a good filter does make sense for ambient light WA at diving depths, as it helps mitigate colour casts and achieve a more even colour balance in post in these shooting situations. That is what filters are actually for, not for “bringing back the reds”, contrary to what many people seem to believe. Using a filter gives better results than not using one when shooting ambient-light wide angle footage in a flat profile, as it helps manage the colour cast created by water’s filtration at diving depths when resetting white balance in post. It avoids pushing WB to extremes when dealing with the colour cast (which distorts overall colour balance), preserves cleaner chroma information, and it also helps maintain consistency across shots/depth. As a small reminder to the nay-sayers, filters are still commonly used on cine cameras such as REDs by professional, blue-chip camera operators shooting in specific wide angle situations. Do you really think the capabilities of a cinecam shooting in REDCODE RAW are inferior to those of an action cam? It's time to stop believing in miracles, shooting in RAW or in LOG does not suspend physics... Neither do GoPro Labs hacks for that matter. Back to actual action cams, check out this workflow for inspiration and more info on the subject: https://waterpixels.net/articles/articles_technique/afterhours-magic-ambient-light-video-workflow-for-action-cameras-r161/ Regarding filters themselves, there are gel alternatives you can try (see above thread for links). They are inexpensive and will fit inside the newer GoPro dive housings, between the camera lens and housing port, allowing them to be used with any wide lens. They will likely give better results than Polarpro filters, which were not really designed with an understanding of the effect filters should have on the ambient light spectrum, unlike more researched filters like the UR-Pro Cyan or Keldan Spectrum filters. On white balancing in post, I will throw in a YouTube video of my own, since this seems to be a growing trend in action cam discussions. I am very much on the same page as what Mark is doing here with his GP12 log footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DRmzwaO7YU No, he doesn't use filters but the logic is the same. And yes, I still believe a filter would still help for wide angle situations for the reasons mentioned above, even when shooting in log and using multiple gopro labs hacks, since log is just a flat profile, and not a miracle. At the end of the day, a camera can only do so much underwater, and no, it's not just about boosting that red channel because reds are absorbed by water... It's not as simple as that, unfortunately. cheers ben

I remove the oring of my Nauticam LX10 clamshell housing after every diving day, clean the groove (which has water dropplets) with a pair makeup applier spongy thingies, check, clean the o-ring and micro-lubricate it with Nauticam grease - it's mostly to help as I run it around the fingers a few times to feel for any grit. I'm also more of feeler for this. If there is any I remove it and replace the o-ring after it feels smooth and double check there is nothing visible on the o-ring or housing groove. Lights I do every once in a while, when the oring is unclean, feels a little dry or if the lights where in direct contact with sand. I used to lubricate the outside of the o-ring only but am now happier removing them as it's a good way to check the groove as well, as I've had suprises. I shore dive every second day, 3 days a week on average.

Ok, as a follow-up, things have gone a little haywire.... I wasn't getting a response from AOI to my enquiry to clarify service conditions posted above, so I emailed them again and got the following message yesterday: Thank you for your follow-up email. While we were exploring potential solutions internally, our team also reached out to Fantasea. We have just received a reply from their representative, who confirmed that Fantasea will contact you directly to proceed with the next steps. We have therefore handed over your case to them, and we kindly ask that you watch for upcoming emails from Fantasea regarding further handling. Thank you for your understanding and patience. So unfortunately, it looks like AOI retracted the service offer they had made me and which I'd posted above, which is a little unexpected and, well,... I asked AOI for confirmation that this was the case and have not yet received an answer. **** Later on, a Fantasea rep did get in touch (so they're still operating even if the website is down) and offered for me to ship it to the USA under the following conditions: You can send it to our office to be checked. If internal cleaning is needed, we can do so for $120, including shipping the lens back to you. If replacing optical elements is required, then servicing and shipping will cost more than that. When I replied that this wasn't economically viable for this lens, given my location (Japan) and the price of a new AOI UCL-05N (which is the slightly upgraded version of my lens), and asked about changing o-rings, I was told by Fantasea: Please note that we do not offer parts for sale to replace within the lens (self service). In addition, if it helps, we can extend this price of 180 Euros (USD 212) for a new lens if you wish to order one. This offer is valid until the end of the month. So basically, I can buy a new lens, or pay roughly the price of a new lens to have it serviced. The lens is letting moisture in, so cleaning and servicing plus replacement of elements (o-rings?) would be required.