bvanant

I think that one approach (I tell this to beginners underwater) is to take your camera to a nice location on land and shoot with the lenses you want to use underwater. Pretend to be Ansel Adams and go shoot some nice wide angle photos. Shoot them at a variety of shutter speeds/ f stops/iso settings (all to get the same exposure more or less). Then take them home and look at full resoultion snippets to see if in fact your camera/lens can generate shots you like. It could be that your particular camera/lens for example has some back focus issues and nothing is sharp. That is an easy fix, but maybe not cheap i.e., a new lens. No underwater photo will ever be as crisp/sharp/nice as one on land (maybe the Nasa tank) so that is a good starting point. I shoot flowers and birds on land with a 20MP OM-1 and routinely print A2 (almost, I print 16 x 20 inches, 400x500 mm) with good results. Once you are sure that the system can make photos that meet your desires then move to UW but with care. Shooting WA with rectilinear lenses can lead to mushy corners but if the center is mushy something is wrong. Mismatched lens/dome can also be an issue. I print the photos for both LAUPS and Orange County UPS for the Long Beach scuba show. I have printed a bunch of A6300 photos of things like whales and sea lions, all of them seem to me at least perfectly acceptable. Bill

great shots BVA

There are a zillion little strobes on ali express that might work, they will be much stronger than any LED trigger. Trying to get the output aligned to the window for the fiber might be the biggest issue. Bill

I can not find any details on the AOI trigger talking to HSS mode. Maybe on the hybrid flash but on the MF-2 it is not clear how to make that work. Any ideas welcome. Bill

Yes indeed. RC mode can be very slow, particularly on BW dives. For BW I like RC mode since you might have very transparent beasts and very reflective beasts within a few minutes, but for transparent things like jellies, the second RC shot (at higher power obviously) can take some time. Bill

Maria: I love your shark photo just the way it is, I was only commenting on the way that the OP's photos were white balanced which is part of the what getting good photos is about. More to the point it is good to know when to "break the rules". I like your anemone even better. Both are sharp enough. Bill

No big bump on my AOI housing (OM-1) and the built-in vacuum and LED trigger work fine. But I am pretty sure that it does not support HSS only Oly RC mode and some TTL. Bill

Well to print A2 (full paper size) on my printers at 360 DPI resolution you need 50 MP. At 240 DPI (not optimal for my taste) you need 22MP more or less. One problem is perception; when you are in the water, your brain fills in a lot of things for you i.e, you ignored the fact that the scene is too blue. If you look at Maria's shark it is in fact too blue, proper white balance to get the white patch on the shark actually white, will show something very different. You talk about only 24 mp and even then it is not sharp. Every camera system is just that, a combination of camera/sensor, lens, housing and port. I don't know what lens you are shooting wide but if every shot is not sharp, it likely isn't the sensor or sensor size. Your third pic illustrates the same issue, your color balance is not very good there it is just too blue. Bill

We were in Raja in January and in the North there was a ton of bleaching of corals and anemones. In the south (Misool) not so much but it was warm (31C) Bill

I am looking for a circular fisheye for an OM-1. The 7-artisans 4 mm looks interesting, has anyone shot it underwater? thanks Bill

Mine arrived yesterday. Playing on land. Diving next weekend. Bill

It will likely work fine. There is no magic in the valve, but if you flood I suspect Nauticam will say it was the valve's fault Bill

Get the MF. No optical concentration and the LED is very weak. Bill

Looks like this is the Scubalamp mini strobe shown at DEMA. Surprised that it doesn't speak RC mode for olympus Bill

My take is that there are levels of video and that short (10 seconds like) clips are much more interesting to divers and certainly for non-divers. We do lots of live aboard trips and everyone seems to enjoy a clip much more than a single photo and that I think is the way the world is headed. As for completed longer (3-5 or longer) videos they are clearly much more work (20 minutes of clips for a minute of video) and editing is much more painful but the results can be amazing. More importantly from any scientific view, video can get you things like behavior that you can not get with a photo. My wife is a talented videographer (she has all the talent in the family) and she gave a talk at the international polychaete conference. Many scientists who specialize in worms were astounded and many said "that's not what we thought they did" after seeing footage. One issue is that you can't put a video on the wall for a 10 second perusal, getting someone to sit for 4 minutes to see a video can be a chore. Bill

We were recently in Lembeh with a group that were only interested in competitions. Show them a hairy frogfish and they swim away trying to find a "unique" view of something even more unusual. Before that we were in Edinburgh and saw the World Wildlife results. To me the Judges picks were terrible but the viewer's choices were much more interesting. Guess that means that I really don't understand "art" (not that I want to) Bill

I have the AOI OM-1 housing, previously I had the Isotta for the EM1-III. Both are good housings, but the AOI is like $1000 cheaper and has built in vacuum and LED trigger. For Isotta you will need some other method to trigger strobes and a separate vacuum system. The Isotta is MUCH prettier (cool Ferrari red) but in over 650 dives the AOI has been bulletproof and does the things a housing should do (it keeps the water out and lets you get to all the controls). I have long understood that my photos are not important to anyone but me and $1000 is 5 local dive trips or a few days at a resort. On liveaboards of course I have camera/housing envy. The guy with the $10K Canon R5d/Nauticam/EMWL systems get all the love but while I have camera envy, I don't have photo envy. The AOI/OM-1 is "better" than I am so using it well is what I worry about. null

Thanks Chris, I was writing something very similar but you beat me to it. Bill

Well if they actually do it, it would be nice. We were in Komodo over Christmas and the rangers came over to collect the park fee but didn't do anything to the illegal fishing boats 30 meters away. We also did Raja this trip and there was lots of bleaching in the North. Bill

Lovely Bill

For the EVF vs LCD, I think one big variable is the refresh rate of the two screens. Jim Kasson has some quantitative data here (https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/sony-a7rii-battery-draw-with-evf-and-lcd/) for Sony. Bill

Actually I was thinking of Brownian motion, of relatively small but reflective particles. Certainly particles can move on the order of a few cm/s. If the particle moves enough rotationally then you might guess that it will have different reflectivity for different orientations. But remember I did say it was BS.😁 Bill

High speed sync could theoretically reduce backscatter depending on many things. HSS works by using a bunch of very short pulses. If the particles that cause the backscatter move between the HSS pulses then you could imagine that BS (that's what this is by the way) might be reduced. In practice in a BW dive in quite snotty conditions, not much reduction in backscatter. Bill