CCRphoto

I think that I am fairly sold on the OM-1 now, will take a look at Nauticam & Isotta housings if I get to the GoDiving show in Sydney in a month or so. Good to know that battery life of the OM-1 will meet my needs! I've got to do some research on Strobes. What are you using and how have you found them to be?

Interesting - will be interesting to see what the OM-1 Mark III is like.

Definitely will need an external monitor. I can see that digital will certainly have some advantages over a roll of 36! I don't think that GenZ would cope very well with film! I haven't looked too far into wet lenses yet, I think that will come later after I have learnt to use the system.

I think that the OM + Nauticam housing will have monitor capability but I will check!

Definitely not a manual focus masochist these days - my eyes are too old for that! I didn't realise that M4/3 was an actual standard - good to know. Great info about the lenses - cheers! Saves some trial and error!

Cheers Tim - all good information to know. Have you had a chance to take your OM-1 underwater yet?

Cheers - another vote for OM-1. Hopefully the Mark III will be released soon - bonus points if it fits the existing housing!

I like to keep things simple... - Nemo - Not Nemo

OK cheers. I would definitely want something with a range of ports - I do unusual things at times...

Many thanks for that comprehensive reply @TimG . You were in the unfortunate position of having to replace everything / start from scratch very recently and so you were kind of where I am at but for very different reasons. More than 20-25MP is mostly only needed by people who can't compose properly and so need to crop like heck - well that's my opinion anyway😀 The OM-1 MII seems to be the pick of the M4/3 cameras that work well for underwater stills. There are lots of rumours of a Mark III coming out in the next couple of months - but like a lot of these rumours it is 9/10ths speculation and 1/10th wishful thinking combined with people making social media content about it because they can - we won't know until the day that it is announced. I've got some shares that are (finally) getting the price rerating that they deserve so I'm happy to wait a few weeks and see if the MIII materialises, and if so whether the improvements are ones that are useful for underwater photography - and whether it will fit into the existing housing or... The Australian GoDiving show is in about five weeks, so I might go to that and suss a few things out. Do the lenses from the various companies making M4/3 cameras all share the mount? (or did you have to get an adaptor for the Panasonic 8mm Fisheye?). I've just been doing some reading, and of the available housings for the OM-1 MII the Nauticam seems to be the way to go - AOI housings for the OM-1 sound like they are very very hit or miss as to whether you get a good one or one that is a complete nightmare. With your Nauticam housing - the specs say 307mm wide - does that include the handles or just the housing? I'm hoping that I will be able to fit the entire housing and camera package into a Lowepro roller carryon, and then the rebreather can go in its huge Pelican case from their lightweight series (can't remember their marketing name for them). Australia back to Europe for any repairs to Retra strobes is quite a hassle and expense so I will be looking for something with decent punch that is sold/warranted locally. Inon are releasing a new Z360 strobe sometime soonish... the Backscatter Hydrid HF-1 sounds interesting too - can buy them locally.

You have all successfully convinced me to go for something more modern than the Canin 7D, but I don't know yet what that something should be... so here are some criteria, and ask any questions because I'm coming from 35mm film days and camera specs were a lot simpler/different then! Something smaller than a large DSLR rig would sure be nice as I'm already carrying so much stuff when CCR diving that a large camera system just gets in the way. Having looked at the Nauticam port charts, a Micro four thirds system that uses the N85 ports seems like the way to go as there are a reasonable number of ports and lens combinations for Nauticam and other housings such as AOI in that size range. Someone mentioned in the other thread about the Canon R50, there doesn't seem to be a wide range of ports available for that one though. So I think that limits manufacturers to Sony, Panasonic or Olympus/OM - I've never used any of them so know absolutely nothing about them at all - in fact I have never used a digital camera apart from a phone one. So here goes... in no particular order - camera/housing must be able to use an external HDMI monitor - must be compatible with fibre optic strobe triggering - but I don't need TTL - I'm happy to buy secondhand - must have good low light autofocus - must have a good range of OEM and aftermarket lenses suitable for underwater photography - must have controls/ranges that would be familiar to an 35mm SLR user - e.g F2.8 to F22 or greater, shutter speed controls etc - must have really good battery life - must be able to produce a good quality image - not sure how many megapixels that requires? I've no idea what else are required as far as speccing a camera these days?

I think what I am going to do is forget the 7D idea, and instead come up with a list of minimum specs etc for buying a secondhand rig and see what you all suggest. See https://waterpixels.net/forums/topic/3775-which-camera-housing/

Reading the article that @Architeuthis provided the link to - I think that a monitor will work for me - but I need a bit more info on this part from the article - "Back in the DSLR days, monitors were really practical only for videographers, because you would have to rely on the camera’s “live view” autofocus, which was painfully slow and unreliable. As a stills photographer, you needed to frame your images through the optical viewfinder, for the camera’s autofocus to perform at its best. " How bad is it with a DSLR such as a Canon 7D? Having only ever used 35mm film cameras underwater, and the only digital camera I've used is on a mobile phone, so I've got no idea how bad what he is talking about actually is - or how big a problem it really is?

Many thanks - will take a look!

Another one in the over 50's club - still going!

Many thanks - that's a pretty comprehensive reply. In my case I will be sticking with stills, but my neck issues mean that trying to get eye to viewfinder isn't as easy as it should be so a monitor will be my workaround - it doesn't sound like it will overly constrain me then.

One other question about monitors - what are the disadvantages of using a monitor vs a viewfinder underwater? Obviously battery life is one, but are there any practical differences between using a monitor vs a viewfinder for composition, going through menus etc.?

Interesting! The wide lens in the setup is the Canon 10-22 - no idea how useful this lens is but I guess at its widest it is roughly equivalent to a 15mm Nikonos? I'm still learning how to read the Nauticam port charts but it looks like the 10-22 can be used with a 180mm dome which would be a little more travel friendly. The macro lens in the setup is a 100mm + appropriate port. What do I want to shoot? A bit of everything. Do they still make lenses for the Canon mount that the 7D uses + its sensor size? And are new lenses still being developed for it? Seems to be a lot of new lenses coming out of China these days!

I'm getting back into underwater photography after a 30 year break. Way back then I taught underwater photo on liveaboards in the Red Sea, on Aggressor Fleet boats in the Caribbean and for Jim & Cathy Church at Sunset House on Cayman. This will be my first time using digital cameras so it will be quite... different I expect. Locally there is a Nauticam 7D setup with 230mm acrylic dome port, macro port, strobes, lenses etc at what I consider to be a reasonable price. Are the latest cameras much much better than a 7D? If so in what areas? Will I find a 7D limiting?

How is the M1 Pro for photography in the 60 metre housing? (when shooting things at about 2-3 metres range without any accessory lenses). Reason for asking is am wondering whether it is going to be an improvement over the Hero13 for photogrammetry work?

Welcome from another Aussie!

Life in the Red Sea was a lot simpler back then - and probably a hell of a lot more enjoyable. "carve dive cylinders out of tree trunks" - only amateurs did that - us pro's would just bung a valve into the neck of a Roman amphora and go diving.

I think back to when I was guiding on liveaboards in the Red Sea in the late 80's early 90's and look at the liveaboards today and bet the punters these days don't realise how good they have it! For some reason we didn't bother about safety briefings about life jackets or life rafts etc back then...😄

Ordered from the U.S. - we had quite a lot of work going on at the time and so we had a freight consolidator/forwarder in Los Angeles that happened to be just around the corner from Blue Robotics, we had spare parts and addons for all sorts of exotic equipment from various manufacturers in the U.S. all being sent to the consolidator and every Friday in L.A. the consolidator would box up everything that they had received and send it to us, and we would receive it on the following Tuesday or Wednesday - it worked pretty well for us.

Yes - doing over 2 hours deco each day - day after day... sucks...