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I think for the AOI, the port and lens will be a bit cheaper than the MFO-3 plus flip adapter. I use the 30 a lot and can shoot relatively big things if the water is clear. On our recent Sea of Cortez trip I got some nice sea lion shots with the 30. Bill -
I would think that 2 o-rings are there for redundancy, but it is hard to understand how it would leak unless both were small. Bill
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If you are not going to edit then it really doesn't matter, you are basically using it to talk to external drives that you will download later. If you are going to edit then get a bigger drive. The 512 drive is like $200 more than the 256 (which is robbery, 512 GB SS drives are like $30). But if you dive a lot say 100 dives per year and you keep it 5 years then the per dive cost is 6500 Rupiah or about 40 cents. Bill
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The 1000 lumen version that I had was useless. This one is a lot better BVA
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I can still order some if there is some demand. BVA
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In the US they are $50 different. My take is that the RC mode with the OM-1 and the RC strobes, things work just fine. Bill
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We started with Drobo and have now migrated to OWC using SoftRaid. My wife's video needs lots of storage, the OWC hardware has been very stable and fast. Bill
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A few months ago in November, Scubalamp showed a new "small strobe". I like small strobes and wanted one, but they have never appeared on the Scubalamp website. However there is a Fotocore GTM (the same ones in the Scubalamp posts that are available. I bought two of them, and last Saturday, I got to try them out here in Los Angeles. The strobe is a bit larger than the AOI RC strobes, and a bit smaller than the YS D3 Duo. The strobe is machined aluminum and appears to be very solidly built if a bit heavy (815 g without the 2 x 18650 batteries). The strobe has 7 power levels that are shown on a nice little LED screen on the back. The key advantage to the GTM is that it has beautiful light since it uses a circular flashtube. One peculiarity of the strobe is that it uses only flattop 18650 batteries that are both hard to find and expensive. I have boxes of 18650 button tops, but no joy in these strobes. To test them out, we went out diving to our local favorite spot off of Palos Verdes not far from LAX. I was shooting an OM-1 camera in an AOI housing with the 2 GTM strobes an a Leica/Panasonic 45 mm macro lens. The AOI has a built in LED trigger that never missed a shot with the strobes, I was using home-made fiber cables using the 613 core fibers. The Balonophyllia is a solitary stony cup coral, its main claim to fame is that in the colder months (it is always cold at PV, typically 50F, 10C) it can in fact sequester dissolved organic carbon from the seawater directly. Hopefully it can teach its warm water cousins the same trick. If California had a state nudibranchs it would likely be the Spanish Shawl These guy are everywhere and are quite beautiful. Interestingly the orange/blue/red and purple colors are all from the same molecule but with different arrangements of some elements. Black eye gobies are always curious, coming by to see what you are doing and smiling at you Two similar nudies are Porters and MacFarland; you tell them apart by the number of stripes. Porters has 2 syllables and 2 stripes, MacFarland has three of each. And finally there are clowns. Overall, I am very pleased with the performance of the GTM strobes. I didn't have a chance to see how they would be for wide angle (mostly the visibility was 2 meters or so) but at least in the studio they seem as powerful as the YSD3. If you are looking for strobes for macro shooting with some occasional wide angle take a look at these. Bill -
After all the nonsense published about the MFO-1 and subsequent before and after work showing not very much difference are there ANY with and without photos? I spent $500 or so on the MFO-1 and don't want to make another mistake. We do lots of black water and using the 30 macro (either Oly or Pany) I seem to be close enough for anything I want to shoot. Bill
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A few years ago, I was a Medtronic tech fellow and we had a small ($15K) grant to do anything technical that wasn't about your day job. I decided to learn about batteries, specifically about rechargeable NiMH AA batteries. I talked to colleagues who design batteries for implantable devices as their day job and they helped me build a computer controlled battery tester. I bought every AA battery I could find, lots of cheap Chinese ones, eneloops (white and black) and a bunch of no-name ones from Ali Express. Name brand batteries that were tested at low discharge currents were in fact more is better i.e., if you put them on 0.05 A discharge rates the time to a specific voltage was proportional to the stated capacity. To test utility in a strobe, I took one of my Z240 strobes to the EE boys in the lab and they pulled out the charging circuit to emulate with my computer controller. Unfortunately they were unable to put it back together and keep it dry. In any case I tested all the batteries in pairs using the charging circuit and using a fast discharge and repeated til the battery reached the test voltage. What we found was that eneloop whites (2000 mAh) got the most flashes. Eneloop Pros were occasionally a bit more and occasionally a bit fewer flashes but were quite variable. Most of the Powerex 2700 batteries got 30% fewer flashes than the Eneloop 2000s. I was surprised but when I talked to my battery inventing colleagues they said "of course, we could have told you that" internal discharge is critical. I haven't run the tests lately (the instrument had a loud beep whenever a battery test completed and my wife got tired of 3AM beeps). Bill
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Cardiac Hill in Palos Verdes is a long long climb down (not so bad) with a handrail at the top, but going up with tanks and weights is for when I had a much different body. Like much of PV it is either really good or really bad. It is the reason that God made boats. Bill
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Linda is a trip. We did a 2 per night blackwater trip with her at NAD. Bill
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For sale is a pair of Fotocore GTM strobes, never been wet. I got these as part of a trade and realize that I really don't need more strobes sitting in a closet. They are very compact and powerful, with a beautiful light from circular flash tubes. Model: GTM Mode: 7 modes Guide number: 24 Flash tube: Circular flash tube Power: 120Ws Connection: Optical cable Illumination: 160°-110°(Reduction Ring) Battery pack: FOTOCORE battery (2 x 18650 lithium batteries) Battery pack power: 25.2 wh Flash Capacity: 800 flashes at full power, 5000 flashes at 1st mode Recycle time: 0.1s-1s Flash speed: continuous Unlimited flash sync with 10flashs/sec from first to third mode Power indicator: LCD displaying Color temperature: 5000K Waterproof Depth: 100m Focus/target light: 5W/ 500 lumens (center focus) Dimensions: 118*75mm Bluewater has them for $450, the Fotocore site has them for $450. Yours for $700 for the pair. Bill Shipped free in the US, outside the US you pay shipping. Bill
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There is a big push here in California to do "clear lens replacement" which is IOL surgery without cataracts. The big selling point is that you will never get cataracts (while true is a bit disingenuous since they take out the lens that could get cataracts). I just received today my new dive mask from Prescription Dive Masks in San Diego. Vision looks fine but will be out of the water for a couple more weeks so I won't get to test it soon. I got it from them at the Long Beach Scuba show, $400 which includes the mask. There was a company selling progressive lenses for masks, but they were like $700 and I am not sure that progressive masks make much sense. Bill
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Well the new Canon 100 macro for the R5/6 is amazing. Jeff Laity has some awesome nudibranch shots from local SoCal waters with it. Bill
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