Klaus

Don’t let the better be the enemy of the good enough, right? I have low needs for the moment and the AA are just perfect, make life easy. Yet I think Dave is right, Lithium Ion is the future. They are probably not necessary for some (many?) applications, but essential for others. The normal lamps (I.e. flashlights) are all 18650 or higher already. So it’ll be standardized and simple as well once everything is 18650. But flying could remain an issue. Who knows…

From a real amateur perspective: (Land)Photography has been my hobby since teenage days in the mid-80s , so naturally when I took up diving 5 years ago I wanted to bring some pictures back up. I started out with a cheap go-pro knock-off and thought I’d be shooting stills. But then I discovered that I was so occupied with gear &staying at a constant (well…) depth that I would never press the button at the right moment. So I started shooting constantly I.e. recording video. Obviously this was no good for anything other than extracting a mediocre still. Since then I have changed the setup to a small mirrorless and while it certainly can record movies, I have almost never tried that again. Good video footage requires REALLY good diving skills I think, something that only (semi)-pros or early-retired self-made millionaires can reach in a reasonably short time. But is there a market for the clips? If you live off your diving+ filming, you need to sell the clips. There is an established market like gallery prints or magazines for stills, nonetheless few diving photographers are able to live from just that. But video? I feel that there is a huge gaping hole between instagram and the BBC productions. And that makes it very difficult to grow past waving a GoPro around for souvenirs. I know that land-based videographers can make very good money by creating “reels” for influencers, but who will pay for the mating squids? In the absolutely stunning freediving iceberg movie by Alex B mentioned before, Anna being a professional perhaps this could be considered like filming an influencer. But I am not sure whether this is a for-profit production (they certainly deserve it) or barely recovering the costs of making it.

Is there really no one who tried Cabo Verde for diving yet? Asking this to bump up the topic just once. I guess I’ll apply for a Waterpixel travel grant to fill the void…

You can‘t be prepared for everything that could possibly swim by, unless your buddy carries a separate macro set-up while you shoot wide-angle. If you find a buddy like that, let me know. For macro shots, I use the kit-zoom with a wet diopter on a flip adapter. This is easy to switch, definitely my most flexible option and allows for shots at a larger field of view than the dedicated macro lenses. It is a compromise for quality at both scales - kit+ diopter is not as good as dedicated macro and kit + distance is not as good as an ultra-WA setup. But I don’t sell my photographs and „normal“ people care more for the subject and composition than the slight lack of contrast and sharpness. When I‘m down with the fish-eye I like to shoot CFWA but that close-up shot of rhinophores with buttery background-bokeh won’t happen. Once you‘re under water, you make the best of it with what you have. And on my last dive, I accidentally switched the file format to small&low res, no raw, so ended up with some nice compositions at 1280x720 with heavy smoothing. 😞 There‘s more than just a lens to ruin your day. I tell myself that a missed shot because of the wrong lens is rather a sign of better luck than anticipated for that dive. But I would voice some bad words if it wasn‘t for the regulator…

We are contemplating a vacation in the Capeverdian Islands (Cabo verde) next year. There is not all that much (useful) information about diving there on the net, so I thought I‘d ask around here. Does anyone have experience to share? Is the diving good, if so at which season, can you recommend a dive center, a hotel or anything else we might want to know? Or maybe you found a good website to consider for planning the trip? We are aware that the Atlantic is not the Red Sea, we visited the Azores and Madeira before & liked this a lot because of the combination of diving and above-water activities like hiking. It seems that Cabo Verde might be a logical „next step“, but maybe that is just our imagination.

The video is just plain amazing, no matter how many likes it got. 30 min with a 5 mm suit , wow. If one day we need to show movies to kids and explain what icebergs once were, I hope it will be this clip. But above all I hope things won‘t get that far, so you can continue to amaze us.

There are three flash modes (perhaps even more on the em-1) that you can set in the camera - manual, ttl and the proprietary rc-mode. Is the problem always there, or does it occur only with one of the settings? I vaguely remember reading that in rc-mode the number of pre-flashes is more than one and maybe even variable(not sure about the last). I always use manual mode @ 1/64 intensity on my epl-5 and have not had any issues with Sea&sea strobes (older than ys-2). So that will be very different on your setup - but maybe it can help to find the source of the problem?

I „only“ have the bare UWL-100 without a dome, so that is relatively compact and weight only about 700 g I think. Still, it‘s enough for not taking it off during the dive at all - so I „store“ it on the port - period. I also have a close-up lens for macro and that goes on a sort of flip-adapter, but mine will definitely not work for then wide-angle lens. As I said, it‘s a dedicated wide-angle setup once you put it on. Quite a good one, but a bit unwieldy. Just try it out and see how you like it. There is enough time for looking at used ones after your trip and indulge in GAS before the next one. I think that is what almost everyone does on this forum…

This was maybe a bit terse - your wfl-01 wetlens will certainly serve you well under water and should give you about 120 degrees field of view, which is good. You can also zoom in, which can be quite helpful. But I find shooting with the dome +fisheye is a much smaller and more maneuverable, in short enjoyable, setup under water than adding the uwl-100 to my flat port. Taking the wetlens off during the dive, storing it and putting it back on later is quite difficult. So, apart from the zoom function you will be diving with a dedicated wide-angle setup - and the fisheye lets you get even closer to things, unless they swim away (I‘ve mastered sponges and starfish so far). The nice thing about the fisheye lens is that you can also use it topside between the dives - the wfl-01 is definitely not something you will want to take on a hike. Thus, I recommend setting up a regular search here, on eBay, your favorite classifieds … and when a nice pen-housing size dome shows up (Inon also made one some time ago) try to get it for a good price. Then, the manual fisheyes can usually be found very cheap while a nice & affordable Lumix 8mm may require a bit more patience.

Hi Sacha, I recently sourced a used fisheye-dome for my epl-5 setup in an Olympus housing. AFAIK these were made by AOI and the ports are identical. If you can find a used AOI or Zen or Athena dome for a good price, I recommend getting that plus a used Lumix 8mm fisheye for wide-angle shots. You can also start off with the manual Samyang/Rokinon/Walimex 7.5 mm fisheye; it’s a compromise but I got mine for 60 € second hand. I have now taken my dome (Athena) on a trip and this is very compact and light-weight. I have an Inon UWL-100 wetlens as well (without the class dome) but this will likely stay at home next time as it’s feels heavier than the dome+lens I have.

A very entertaining thread indeed. Maybe there should be a fishing vest in the waterpixels store? The logo should be on the INside then …

My gut feeling is that one big driver behind the computational development was / is to make pics possible WITHOUT all the big and dedicated lenses and so on. To some extent the goal is replacing optics with software as much as possible. Taking this technology into mirrorless cameras is maybe counter-intuitive for these companies? And why bother, given the market size…

So Chip… now you have to finish the wine bottle every time?

Wow, Ben, this is all so thought- and beautiful… did you use chatGPT for this? Just kidding, but that’s what my kids would have done. I use my phone for messaging, occasionally to pay for parking. But I HATE taking pictures with it. Just doesn’t get me in the mood. However, some kid waving around his IPhone will likely make at least as good a shot than me with a real cam. Maybe smartphones will become the entry-drug into uw imaging, then eventually be replaced by a real camera in the hands? Alas, cameras are almost never made specifically for uw use, they are usually adapted. So, once they’re gone above, they’ll be gone beneath the waves soon after. But for the moment, we can still discuss and vividly disagree about (dis)advantages of some really heavy screw-on optical addition to our gear collection. And worry about the money it costs and WAF required. It doesn’t get any better, no? 😉

The iPhone sales numbers are almost scary, but Apple does not only develop the camera of that device - it is also a quite powerful computer with everything that goes along with this, in particular software development I suppose. Still, this is a huge advance in numbers over interchangeable lens cameras. I would not have expected this to be so large. I wonder if all the software-magic for the image processing can one day be applied to (raw) images taken with other cameras afterwards? In essence will Apple transfer this all to a photoshop equivalent? Perhaps they already did and I just don’t know about it…