Mike Saunders

Welcome is there decent diving in coastal Georgia? - or would you go down to Florida to dive?

Baseball cap ordered. I’ll wear it with pride on my next trip (Tenerife)

one wouldn't want to get too close to Iran in case they arrested you and accused you of spying or just machine gunned you on the spot I'm imagining the reefs on the Oman side might be quite un-dived and intact this week might not be ideal but it would be bloody quiet and you could always watch the missiles flying overhead from the RIB...

Is it just me - or is all the media attention on the straits of Hormuz making anyone else wonder about what the diving might be like there? I can see that the is a diving outfit in the tip of Oman - probably accessible from Dubai airport (obv. not quite at the the moment.....) Diving – Musandam Has anyone tried diving on that side of the Arabian peninsula? I suppose that there is so much goodness in the red sea it would have to be pretty good to justify the increased risk of diving in such a volatile part of the world.

on the plus side I have been using the ring light at work to take photos during syrgical procedures (ENT surgeon) and it is fantastic with my new 11-20 2.8 tamron for wide angle macro images

bah humbug. It turns out that the few extra mm engendered with a +1 filter is too much for the macro port too! Back to the drawing board. I'm ordering a shorter macro port to use with a shorter and therefore closer focusing macro lens 🙄

update 2 the port is not long enough for the 90mm lens and an extension tube have ordered a +1 and +2 filter will update again

having both at the same time is such a great option - as you mentioned having the housing for macro and it is almost no extra effort to attach a go pro somewhere in the rig in case you see something really good you want to record

impressed with your dedication in this weather. I think I would have settled with the bar.

Cunning plan: Use +1 diopter or extension tube with 90mm Shorten focal distance and enter the realm of super macro The bath beckons

in fact I am going to answer my question myself. I have bought one of these and it looks great and I love the handling and idea of a small rig with no strobe arms for macro Testing underwater (in the bath- living in a very cold rainy UK in February) reveals a few things: minimum focus length of the 90mm macro is 28cm from focal plane so you cannot get very close to the front of the macro port with it for this reason shooting at 1/16 and ISO 200-400 is not quite enough - time and wife allowing - I am going to try further bath tests at iso 800 I'm looking into shorter macro lenses so I can get closer two option appear apt sony e-mount macro 30mm. Cheap but f3.5 maximum 1:1 on e- mount apsc tamron 35mm - slightly more but f2.8 and probably optically better. 1:2 on full frame but on my alpha 6000 apsc it would be more like 2:3 so not far off the Sony unfortunately this would also mandate a new short macro port with the 67mm thread. Any comments on above? I also conducted some in-bath tests with my new 6 inch dome and a tamron 11-20 and a viltrox 9mm 1.8. The close focus ability of both is amazing with the dome port but it is harder to judge how they both cope with a more complex underwater scene. Gearing up for a live-aboard in Komodo later in the year and enjoying doing the research and playing with kit in the meantime.

Looking at the pupil of the Sony 90mm on that website it is nearly at the back - I’d have to have a gigantic dome to get this matched the the optical dome centre Think I’ll stick with the flat port!

Being a bit of a cheapskate I ordered a large rectangular block of closed cell foam to the dimensions of an existing carry on (about £15-20 GBP) I then cut holes in it to fit the housing and some other components - solis strobes, lenses, camera bodies. I was also able to fit a macbook air into the lid of the carry on. It actually worked pretty well. You can just see the foam in the back of the picture warning - disposable surgical scalpels are (unsurprisingly) sharp. See foreground...

the video is absolutely great- well laid out, very clear and objective I have been using a sony 90mm macro lens a long flat port. Am I to understand that it would be better with a dome - in which case I presume you would have to use a dome with some long extension rings to accommodate the bulk of the lens? I'm shooting in APSC so I have thought it wouldn't really make any difference but the video seems to suggest otherwise

I've just watched some of the videos too! Amazing. That's my admin afternoon screwed!

I'm always very jealous of people who are able to spend this much time underwater - especially with sharks as a holiday diver I'd be delighted to even see a hammerhead let alone feed it my camera!

having found the optical centre of a lens and the theoretical centre of the curvature of the dome... how critical is the approximation of the two? Spacers are available for ports but seem to come in say, 10mm increments does being off by 2-3 mm make a critical difference? or is within a centimetre or so acceptable?

would this work OK with a 90mm sony macro on APSC?

A bull shark, to be precise. According to Claude Maillaud, the shark that attacked a scuba diver's forearms on January 3rd at the large bend in Kele reef was a female, approximately three meters long, and was clearly identified I would have thought that a 3m bull shark could do a lot worse than bite you on both forearms if it was in the mood

changing the behaviour of wild animals to associate scuba divers with food it IS only a matter of time before......

I have a salted line housing - I'm not sure if this is the same as a sea frogs aluminium or not its not bad. Its cheap relative to nauticam and it is quite small compared to my old ikelite 35mm nikon housing Controls are ok but a bit fiddly flooded twice. once a dodgy new macro port from the manufacturer that just leaked once when I was distracted by an alluring dive instructor and forgot to check that I had closed it properly I tend to buy quite cheap cameras to put in it (second hand 6x alphas) and I'm reasonably pleased with it Ideally I would like a full frame with a larger viewfinder but its not a deal breaker

good advice thank you. I'm not sure persuading her to get that close the the sharks will be straightforwards but including her as a model would probably be quite an attractive idea to her. Then of course some images will have to be deleted because I have got her wrong side or her eyes are closed 😊

that's helpful thanks. When we have friendly dive leaders they can sometimes be persuaded to take her along while I fanny about. Are there many of you on here who would solo dive so you can spend say 30 minutes in one spot getting the perfect photo? If in good vis with no current and say at 5-10m max this sounds reasonably safe although I realise that PADI et al would disagree

I'm a relative amateur at UW photography. I tend to holiday dive with my wife who isn't a photographer and we normally trundle along in the group and my photos tend to be rather rushed and very much in the 'drive by shooting' style. On a number of occasions I have tried to spend a few minutes positioning only to find myself detached from the rest of the group I have been looking with some awe at the photos on here. Would it be fair to say that most of you are able to just concentrate on taking photos on a dive? - and if so how do you manage this with buddies and the rest of the group - if you are with a group? My recent trip to the Similan islands was hilarious - as well as being with a group we had a lot of surge underwater so trying any from of macro was quite sporting Mike S

was in Similan Dec 2025 I didn't see any specific policing of this although the dive leader may have stopped me using my camera if he knew I had under 40 dives. there are rangers that go round in boats but I think they mostly check that people have paid for the park fee. The dive leader told me that other boats carrying Thai divers are very trigger happy in reporting other divers to the authorities for touching coral etc because they see it as 'their' coral and not tourists