Klaus

Yes, but they are dimmer in absolute terms. What counts, though, is the relative intensity when the backscatter is compared with the subject. HSS compensates the fact that at faster exposure speeds, the shutter curtains move as an open stripe from top to bottom and multiple strobes (as in stroboscopic) illuminate the sensor as the curtains travel down. Thus: The backscatter-causing particles and the subject will receive the same amount (relative to each other) of light in both cases - HSS and « normal » strobe. If the backscattering particles move in an HSS relevant way, i.e. extremely fast (we’re talking about shutter speed above 1/250 nowadays), then there is too much current and you should get out of the water asap. It should also blur the particles in a similar way for the standard strobe, if not more (full dump is longer than the stroboscopic action). And apart from solid structures, your subject will likely experience the same ripping current. It’s unlikely to be a great shot… I think there are more important reasons to use HSS than backscatter reduction, but in the end it’s user experience than counts - and I cannot provide that for underwater. But top-side I can attest that HSS is not the solution for when it snows 😞

As far as I understand it the warmer strobe colors are a benefit if you (or your camera) adjust WB globally. If you apply a mask during post processing and adjust the WB separately for foreground and water, then I can imagine that the strobe color is not so important any more. I have never tried this, though, because I find making these masks tedious. but above all, I am already super-happy if I get the balance of strobed foreground and background water right for once…

I‘m so jealous- Flores Island is sooo nice! We‘ve been there last summer but didn‘t have enough time to go scuba-diving (just a bit of snorkeling). Scuba is also not very easy to find, or do you know a dive center on the island?

Since you have mentioned traveling - the Canon is APS-C format and hence the lenses will be a larger than micro 4/3 (EM-10). This makes the entire setup a bit larger on the port side. For the EM10, AOI has a polycarbonate housing which is compact and probably of decent quality (the AOI is maybe easier to get from within Europe than the backscatter octo design). This will be easier to pack & travel - whether the EM10 is as capable a camera I don‘t know. I have a Nikon D-3300 APSC SLR and an Olympus EPL-5 MFT. Honestly, with images printed up to 80x60 cm (or 90 x 60) I don‘t see a difference in quality with top-side pictures. This is old gear and I only take the MFT under water, but my guess is that autofocus is more important to worry about than image quality. Perhaps you can test these on dry land by lending them from a shop for a day or two? Lighting with torches can work well for macro, that’s how I started as well. But strobes will probably bring out significantly better quality from the TG4- sensor. Maybe you should start simply with e.g. an MF2 strobe added to your TG4? The strobe will be useful with any camera afterwards.

… and some of those aboard might even smoke 😮 Ok, that’s a completely different story but it nonetheless exists. lithium batteries are not unsafe per se - we might never have seen as many NiMH powered devices in circulation as we do for Li-Ion now. But they are certainly more sensitive to how they are treated, and that‘s where the parallel with smoking may be appropriate. As long as the companies offer a choice - all the better.

I use an epl-5 with the little add-on strobe (in the Olympus housing), this connects through the accessory port and is likely very comparable to the EM-10 pop-up. This syncs at 1/250, but any strobe on the „real“ hot-shoe will only sync at 1/160. The manual also states that rc mode with the little guy only works down to 1/160. I once tried an old strobe from the analog days (risky, as some of those can damage the electronics) and that worked at ANY speed. Thus, the hot-shoe gets a simple electric signal (contact closed) whenever the camera takes a pic. This is of course in manual mode (for speed and f-stop). I found that I could even go 1/320 with this and did not see any shadowing by the shutter curtains. That may not be 100% reliable, though, and perhaps in 1 out of 20 shots there will be some shadowing? Long story short: It is possible that the AOI „manual only“ trigger might even work at shorter than 1/250 shutter speeds. The simpler the device is, the shorter one could go I suppose. However, I think that TTL is worth more than that extra short sync speed, so this is not intended as a recommendation. But perhaps someone here owns the manual only trigger from AOI and could share the experience?

Possibly the 1/250 can only be used with the built-in pop-up flash of that camera. This would make the statement „formally correct“ with 1/250 sync speed, but it is a bit misleading indeed.

Thanks for the info. The owner is Tomos (likely Tommi), he also served as the captain and guided the whole group on one of the dives. I do not remember his father’s name.

If you place the 90 mm in a flat port with 67 mm thread, you could widen the perspective (and depth of field) with something like an Inon UWL-H100 wetlens? Without the glass dome, that makes about an 0.6x for the focal length, so should get you somewhere in between the 30 and the 90. It won‘t better the IQ, but it’s not too bad either. I have a hard time distinguishing afterwards which of my images were shot with that wetlens on. There may be a more recent version by now. However, it will make the rig even more nose-heavy… Not sure whether these air lenses (giving 0.7x) are of good enough for your purpose. The opposite strategy has been mentioned before (30 mm and cropping). Sounds like less hassle to me + AI upscaling can do small wonders these days.

Crossing over to "Critter Identification" now. You mentioned corals - which I am surprised to hear about for Croatia (except the Gorgonians). I have this picture: But that is not a coral - right? It was taken quite shallow, like 8 or 10 m if I remember right. Would anyone know what kind of a critter this is?

Indeed, this was the Vranjak II and it is now run by the son of the former captain. If fact, dad joined us on the trip as an additional hand because of the weather (see below). We went during the second week of September and a 7mm semi-dry was more than sufficient, I ended up diving without gloves down to, ahem, 40 m or so. The weather has been more extreme recently, the sea is warmer, more humidity in the air - we all know the story. This is most noticeable at the end of summer. During our trip there was one day where we couldn‘t dive at all because it was too risky to take the boat out of the harbor. Instead, they ordered cabs that took us to a regional park for a bit of hiking on the cliffs of Dugi Otok. We had nice weather for that, but there were other places really close-by that were hit by a Tornado and had cars washed down the village streets. In essence, I guess the captain took the right decision, plus he did not leave us with a simple deck of cards and this was smart. However, I think the best season may therefore be August nowadays. It might be fun to organize a tour with that boat, but it was really not conceived with photography in mind. I can‘t compare it with anything else, but some other guests said that the liveaboards are slightly more spacious elsewhere. Gut feeling: This is OK for anything ranging from a GoPro, housed smartphone etc. up to a small MFT rig (think Backscatter „Octo“ class). But the full-frame behemoths I have seen on other occasions might be challenging, especially if there‘s more than one aboard.

Thanks for the positive comments! Regarding „the diving looks good“: The UW pics are of course „representative“ i.e. a „best of“ my shots. Fortunately my photography is limiting so the diving is indeed quite OK. I think of this as well worth my time BECAUSE I don‘t need to go half way around the planet to get there. However, I would not recommend traveling from very, very far just to dive in the Adriatic sea. A combined sightseeing, culture + diving trip can be a different story of course.

I could not agree more - while I wrote that my AF still „works“, it is definitely slower than without the extension. This is of course in part because the focus is just simply more difficult to nail, and that‘s no different in MF mode. It’s always a compromise, I guess, just some solutions are cheaper to try out than others. I bought the extension tubes BECAUSE they were so cheap, and I am happy to use them (only above water so far). It is important to know that their effect is stronger with WA lenses. If I zoom in to max. tele setting, then the final enlargement is smallest. As I zoom out to WA, I can get a much stronger enlargement but at an ever shorter working distance. This effect is quite dramatic in practice. There may be a „sweet spot“ of zoom setting and extension length for a given purpose, but you can only find out by trial and error I think.

null I’ve been hesitating for a while to post this trip here – UW-photography was not the prime focus here. But what the heck, it may be of interest to some. We had never done a liveaboard trip before and I thought that we should try something “easy” at first. The Vranjak is operating along the Dalamatian coast & archipelago in Croatia. There are very few liveaboards around there, we only met one other in the harbor once because of bad weather. So, wherever we were diving, we were the only boat on the site. That said, Croatia is not within the coral triangle, neither is it known for aggregations of Manta rays. But from southern Germany, the Cech republic and in particular Austria and Slovenia it is very easy to reach by car – and that may be a good compromise. Why is it an easy start for the boating experience? First of all, the sea is calm in between the numerous Croatian islands. Furthermore, the boat will stop in a harbor every evening, so the night is especially calm and you can also go for a stroll in the lovely villages or jump in for a swim close by. Here’s a view of Sali on the island of Dugi Otok: This was a diving trip but also sightseeing, and there were couples aboard with only one of them scuba-diving. We all really enjoyed the starry sky while anchoring for the night at a remote Kornati island. The boat is nice and we were comfortable but of course I have no point of comparison. The dive operation was fairly “hands off” – we had a briefing for each site, some security instructions on the first day but other than that were left to do as we wished. Fine for us (we dive together in the quarries at home as well) but for beginning divers I recommend inquiring about guides before reserving. The boat is often booked in full charter by travel agencies, which then sell the spaces on their trip. Some bring their own dive masters along, hence this can be different on a different trip (trips start on a Saturday and last for a week). It is by no means a photo-centric endeavor: No dedicated camera room, not a whole lot of extra space on the dive-deck and no rinse bucket for the rig – I could hose it down with freshwater, though. That said, I knew this before reserving, the crew was familiar with handing down a camera and they certainly made every effort to help me along. I have a M43 camera in a small polycarbonate housing, thus I do not need all that much space and it worked out well for me. So, what’s there to see? Croatia has a good number of wrecks and we dove the “Ledenik”, a former swimming fish-factory that capsized in 2008 on a calm day with no waves. Sometimes strange things happen in between these islands, and this incident even occurred magically to rest the boat at a perfect diving depth of max. some 20-ish meters deep. You can find different versions of the story on the web and I don’t know which one of those ended up in the insurance files… We were a bit limited by the weather and the captain could not always reach the best sites on the tour (Kornati islands tour). The zone between 10 and 30 meters depth is essentially sterile and the shallow areas are a mix of seagrass and rocks with some invertebrates but really not a lot of fish. null Deeper down (i.e. below 30 or even 35 meters), when we could get to the sites with vertical cliffs, life starts to re-appear: Gorgonians, sponges, and even some fish. The trip pairs quite nicely with an additional week on the Dalmatian coast, if you can spare the time. The Vranjak operates out of a smaller harbor right next to the ancient City of Zadar and if you hop a bit further south you can reach destinations like Trogir or Split. Here’s the “signature view” of downtown Zadar, at the site of where the forum was during the Roman period. Once again, this trip was not only about diving and rightfully so – I would not qualify the dives as “spectacular”, but not boring either. I suppose others on this forum can say a bit more about diving in Croatia. We thoroughly enjoyed the trip and I did get to take a few shots, both above and below the waterline. However, if you are looking for a die-hard photography trip, then this may not be a good fit for you.

I don’t know about Sony, but I have a set of extension rings for M43 (« automatic version ») and these simply relay the electronic contacts between camera and lens. Autofocus works with these in place, this is for contrast detection in my camera. I am not sure if phase detection would be affected, the lens of course behaves differently with the rings in place. Stabilization is another thing that will be affected. Maybe these are the right ones: https://www.ebay.de/itm/315234634623?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=707-127634-2357-0&ssspo=n6E8rvs7Qs-&sssrc=2047675&ssuid=mFg8uGCCQOC&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY It is definitely a compromise, but these rings can be found for dirt cheap as no-name products online (at least for M43). If it does work, then it’s a lot more affordable than a Zeiss lens. As the saying goes: Zeiss is nice but twice the price…

How about turning that 16-50 into a macro with a good old-fashioned extension ring? Should be cheap enough to try for video in dry-land and see whether it meets the requirements.

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.