During my diving trip last Christmas I got the chance to experiment a bit with getting the TTArtisans 100mm soap bubble lens to work on my sony underwater setup.
I am not yet on a setup I am fully happy with but I will share my findings so far:
The lens installed on a m42-E mount adapter fits well and has full focus range in the nauticam 105 N100 port meant for the sony 90mm macro. There is a few millimetres space left when fully extended which could fit an ND filter.
In the basic setup the focus range is too far out to be practical so I tried adding some macro tubes in-between the m42 adapter and the camera. About 20mm extension gives me a nice working distance on land but unfortunately I do not own the port extension to fit this combination so I have not tested this underwater.
It does fit inside the 105 port with 10mm extension but can not fully extend. I tried this setup with a fixed focus by installing the lens in the housing as far out as it will go within the space and focussing underwater by moving the camera in and out. This worked (focus peaking is a lifesaver) but the working distance is still a bit too far for my liking.
Next I 3d printed and hacked together a focus ring to be able to focus underwater and used that setup without any extension inside the port to have full focus range available and not smash the lens against the glass underwater. In order to get the magnification I wanted, I tried adding my SMC-1 which worked well for super macro but was a bit too strong for normal macro. I believe this setup with a weaker diopter could work quite well.
What I learned the hard way was that a focus ring for an m42 lens also doubles as a lens remover quite well. To tackle this I intend to purchase a m42 to E mount helicoid adapter which then also doubles as the macro extension. This also moves the part the focus ring has to grab onto further back, which makes the focus ring more stable as it can be shorter. I am also hoping another adapter will fix some of the internal reflections my current m42 adapter is giving me.
The lens itself is very similar to the trioplan 100, with much of the same nice bokeh but also the same problems. Consider it a much cheaper trioplan 100 without dust in it.
Does anyone here have some experience shooting the GoPro with the max lensmod on? If so, what housing were you using with it? I am looking to have a wider option for the gopro but would like to keep the setup small and contained so wet optics or big domes are not preferred in my situation.
