CCRphoto

You need to delay the price increase until the 1st of October! My copper mine shares haven't reached the top yet.

Cheers! Will be interesting to see how I go! Hopefully I don't get too many garbage in...

Ah OK. My memory might be too fuzzy to remember... I'll blame all of those all-nighters on Tuesday nights at Cha Cha's nightclub in Hurghada back in the late 80's / early 90's😀

Interesting! Have you found any software that is better than Helicon?

Very nice!! We get a very similar species down here in winter and they make spectacular subjects!

Many many thanks for running all of those tests! That gives me an absolute ton of useful information to work with. It is obviously going to take some work to get things up to around 8 frames per second. I guess besides increasing the ISO or lowering strobe power to get the frame rate I need, the other answer would be to add more strobes😀 Or for really still invertebrate subjects use longer exposure times and video lights.

Not my footage so please don't critique, but really interesting - I have never seen or heard of Emperor Angelfish acting as cleaner fish! https://www.facebook.com/reel/1457512566216158

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.

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

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

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...

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?

I'm glad that Sony's model naming conventions are pretty logical to someone... The A7 V is a hybrid camera, but the A7R VI is a high end stills camera - surely it would make more sense to give the high end stills cameras their own number line like A3 VI instead of mixing them in with the A7 hybrids and hoping that everyone somehow figures out that an A7 without the R is a hybrid and with an R is a stills camera with nearly twice the MP? Gen Z must be totally confused as they usually have absolutely no knowledge of Roman numerals! At the moment I am waiting to be approved to join a A forum so as I can ask a couple of really indepth questions.

Their whole lineup is so all over the place that their cheapest 24MP camera is three times the price of a Z5ii - but it is designed for Pro sports photography. They have four less expensive full frame cameras - one of which is the A7V at 33MP, and the other three cheaper cameras are all 61MP cameras - there just seems to be no logical progression to their lineup at all!

The Nikon is certainly a bit cheaper, but not enough to rule out the Sony - especially with the $400 cashback and a few other bonuses. Dimensions - the Nikon is 134 x 100.5 x 72mm, the Sony is 130.3 x 96.4 x 72.3 - so sizewise they are much of a muchness. I agree that the A7V isn't a great comparison to the Z5ii - unfortunately it was best that I could find as Sony's current range doesn't seem to have any natural order or ascendancy - it just seems like a whole bunch of cameras that were designed were each designed by a separate committee - that never communicated with each other... but if you can know of a Sony model that is a better comparison I would be keen to know! The battery life is I think going to be important to me if I get right into the focus stacking - using the CIPA standard the Z5ii will run for 330/380 images, however the Sony will run for 630/750 images - which could be important as my favourite local shore dive is a 600 metre swim out to it - and I'm getting too old to swim out all that way, run just 5 or 6 focus stacks before running out of battery...

102MP must be nice for some people, but the extra storage capacity and processing power... nah. I think 24.5MP (Nikon) or 33MP (Sony) will be enough.

I'm a glutton for punishment😀 I'm planning to get Retra Maxi strobes, so then it will be a case of testing them to see what frame rate they can keep up to at the strobe power settings needed for macro and then set that in the focus stacking menu when setting up a stack. Will be trial and error, but hopefully the results will be worth it - if not then nothing really lost. Everyone else is snooting so it will be good to produce some different macro images if I can.

Ugh N100 ports for Sony - that's a bit of a turn off - I've no idea why they can't build housings for Sony that take N120 ports directly. Will see waht the hotshoe and flash trigger situation is like for the A7V - hopefully they have resolved the hotshoe problem by now! The Sony does seem to have a couple of advantages - Sony make their E-mount available to far more 3rd party lens manufacturers than Nikon (or Canon), and the battery life on the Sony is a lot better - which wouldn't be important for a lot of people but might be important if I get into doing a lot of focus stack macro.

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?

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

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.

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!

I'm just finalising my purchase plans for getting back into underwater photography after a 30-odd year break - my last underwater camera was a housed Nikon F4. I'm choosing to go mirrorless due to the ability to fit a large 5 or 7 inch monitor to the camera rig which will make underwater shooting easier for me. It will be a FF mirrorless, probably a Nikon Z5ii in a Nauticam housing, but potentially it could be a Sony FF in a Nauticam housing.

For my archaeological work, lack of light due to both depth and being in the shadow at the foot of a fringing reef wall will be an issue for some of the images I hope to capture that show the wider wreck site. Obviously a pair of Retra Maxi's will light up foreground things, but it will be nice if I can capture things in the background as well.