Dave_Hicks

The best thing to do to verify the sensor is to take a photo of a clear blue sky if possible. This will give you the best blank image that you can use to verify dust or streaks on the sensor. In my experience, the particulate matter or smudges on the sensor have to be pretty obvious before they start impacting your images. As for the acrylic dome, my experience with Novus is mediocre. I think it's fine for finishing, but to get any real dings or scratches out you need to get a stack of MicroMesh wet sandpaper. It has a gradient of ~10 papers from course to ultra-fine. About two hours (watch a movie while you do this) and you can go through the stack and come up with a brand-new dome.

This article sparked a memory of a great piece of Japanese artwork that I once saw in a museum in Frankfurt Germany of all places. It's a late 19th or early 20th century woodblock triptych. Sort of a "Samurai meets Thunderball" scene. 🙂 Kobayashi Toshimitsu Triptych - "Underwater fight at the Yalu River" Rare Kobayashi Toshimitsu triptych | Graphic Arts (princeton.edu)

To get a bit more of a 3d look that will bring out the texture of the subject, try repositioning and aiming the strobe in different ways. If you are not seeing the scales, eye bulges, protruding fins of your subject, you may be generating flat images. For close up shots like the one shared above, I like to have a long arm, canted up between 9pm and 12pm, maybe a bit behind the subject. Aim the strobe toward the lens, and not canted outward. Control the strobe power until you get a look you like. You may find this works better to control backscatter as well, depending on conditions. If you add a second strobe, use it for fill light. Off to the other side and at a very low power so you don't eliminate the shadows created by the key light.

I think the only trouble spot with this DIY is that if you use an Adapter/Drive combo that is not a recommended pairing you might get a card that does not fit in the camera card slot well. With the adapter I purchased the manufacturer had a list of suggested ssds for particular cameras. The other gotcha might be selected a poorly performing ssd. Some cards have inconsistent performance as your write more and more data to the card, which is going to be a problem for video or wildlife photography. So stick to the recommended pairing and you should do well.

It's an extremely popular and commonly used lens in UW photography on Nikon. It is not known to have issues. I have a dozen friends that have put 1000's of hours on the 60mm, and it's generally not a trouble spot. I didn't blink an eye at buying another 105mm after mine started acting up. Sh@t happens. That said, individual lenses are going to fail over time, regardless of brand.

It is hard to beat the Backscatter MF-2 for snoot work. It's small, light, and custom designed to be used explicitly with a snoot. I rarely shoot macro without it anymore. I also sometimes shoot wide angle with an Inon 330 primary strobe and hit the subject of the image with the MF-2 snoot. And then pull of the snoot for other wide-angle shoots where the MF-2 is the fill light.

On the "chip side" of the ssd. The flip side of what you see in the photo. Just a smear of it spread over the surface. Then you screw together the aluminum housing with some tiny screws. The adapter come with a very handy little magnetic screwdriver and a couple of extra screws.

It's fast. I don't have a USB interface with enough throughput to max out the drive, but in a USB 3.2 reader i get over 400MB/S read and write. I would need a Thunderbolt card reader to get close. Or put the ssd directly in a PCs nvme slot. However the camera is using a full pci-express bus and able to read/write much faster. Benchmarks of the particular ssd i am using do show it hitting over 1500MB/S read and write.

[The DIY forum was bare, so I decided to add some inaugural content!] I recently bought a Nikon Z8 mirrorless camera. I have not decided to get a housing for it yet and will use it for wildlife photography for a while before taking that plunge. Some of the key features and advantages of this and similar new cameras is the ability to shoot an incredible # of frames per second and shoot extremely high-quality video. It will shoot 20 frames per second of RAW photos, and up to 120 fps in JPG format. These features require extremely fast memory cards to get full advantage from them. Enter the CFExpress Type B memory card format. While not exactly new - my D850 added support via a firmware update a while ago, this is the first time I was incentivized to acquire a CFExpress card. I currently use a mix of XQD and SD cards with the D850, and they both still work with the Z8. Of course, you always want the latest and greatest. So, I did some research. I found that the really fast CFExpress cards are ridiculously expensive. Much more expensive than XQD or SDCards of similar capacity, but also much faster. Over $400 for a 512GB card and well over $500 for a 1TB card. With a little more research, I also found that these cards are essentially just a standard nvme SSD storage drive commonly used in Laptops in an enclosure exactly like that of an XQD card. And that there are bare enclosures available at low cost, much like you might find for putting a bare hard drive into a USB enclosure. Looking at reviews and manuals, I picked the Sintech CFExpress Type B adapter. They recommend a few brands and models of NVME driver that are known to work and fit inside the enclosure. The tolerances are pretty tight, so a drive even .5 mm too thick could result in the card not fitting in your camera. I put together two 512GB CFExpress cards using a Sintech adapter and Samsung PM991a nvme SSDs. These are pcie 4.0 nvme drives with a write speed of 1,800 mb/s. The adapters + ssd and some thermal paste cost about $90 for 512GB of fast storage. Looking at the options for "real" CFexpress Type B cards, I found the price scales up with the speed and quality of the cards. A basic Lexar Silver 512GB card costs about $150, but are far slower and not suitable for high end video on the Nikon Z8. A high-end Lexar Diamond 512GB card costs $530 and are about equivalent to what I put together. The Write speed of the faster cards is over 1,500 MB/S, and nearly double what the slower cards can do. And 7-8x faster than a good SDCard!] At $90 for the DIY solution, you are saving hundreds of dollars per card for effectively the same product. Now I would probably have been just fine with the slower Lexar cards as I don't do video. But if you need a high-end card in your Z cameras, this is an excellent way to go. I've used them on my Z8 for a few sessions shooting birds at 5 fps and 30 fps speeds to test them out. They seem to work great and don't get more than warm during heavy use. I also copied a few 6GB windows ISO images back and forth in my (new) CFExpress card reader and were fine. These cards are actually as fast or faster than my USB SSD storage drives I use to backup my laptop. The Sintech adapters are great and fit perfectly when you pair them with one of the recommended SSD parts. It seems like a fantastic solution without the ridiculous "Photographer" markup being charged for what are commodity PC parts. [ A pair on Sintech CFExpress adapters, one open showing the SSD. And and SDcard for size comparison. ]

Wow, a great article. Very interesting, comprehensive, and well written. I really neat insight into the culture of Japanese diving. Thanks for sharing!

I had the exact same problem with my Nikon AF-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm F/2.8G IF-ED. I was diving in Fiji and had this happen on several occasions. Including a night dive with ripping current. It was super annoying and frustrating. Out of the water and housing I could never replicate it. I tried multiple times and it always worked perfectly. I cleaned the contacts on the lens, body, etc. I don't recall if I tried a factory reset on the body, but that could not hurt too much to try. I just bought another copy of the lens and sold the old one. The problem was not worth the gray hairs.

You can adjust the white balance in lightroom pretty easily and may get some improved images. This is works best if the shots were made in no more than 20 feet of water with lots of natural light. Beyond that, you really should start looking at add a single strobe. A Backscatter MF 1 or 2, or an Inon 220 might be your best entry level options.

Thanks! Looks like I can post images now, so why not? From my last dive in before I broke my leg in September. Hope to be diving again in January. Egg Yolk Jellyfish in Puget Sound:

It's great to see the new forum up and running! It looks pretty good so far, and it's nice to see a lot of familiar names. Cheers, Dave