Barmaglot

For the reference, I was shooting the Metabones+Canon 60mm combo on an a6300, not an a6600 😉 The adapter firmware update did improve things somewhat over the older version, but it's still pretty frustrating; I missed a lot of shots. Pretty set on upgrading to an a6700, just waiting on SeaFrogs housing availability.

Crooked black frame is typically indicative of a misaligned hood. Make sure that the big petals are directly on the top and bottom of the lens.

Pro Max is 50% more powerful than the Prime; this can give you unbalanced light in your shots, which may or may not be desirable. You can counter it by setting the more powerful flash one click lower, but this might prove a bit annoying to keep track of in practice. I personally would just go with two Primes if your budget doesn't cover a pair of Pro Maxes - they are getting expensive enough that it's difficult to justify their cost (and I shoot a pair of 1st gen Retra Pros; paid about as much for the two as a single Pro Max costs now).

Have you tried it on a blackwater dive? I find that is the most difficult scenario for autofocus underwater - tiny translucent subjects moving around in three dimensions, with not much light to focus by, and nowhere to steady yourself. About to pull the trigger on an A6700 because my A6300 is very much challenged by this.

I've had much less impressive scratches in a dome port (over a Sony 10-18mm) show up quite clearly in images, but a wet lens might be different. However, since this is a Weefine lens, you can get a replacement front element quite cheaply - example: https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4000505953877.html

That looks... extensive, and not really fixable. What lens/dome is it? It might be possible to source a replacement element.

That's actually very minor vignetting for an APS-C lens. On a blackwater dive it should be completely unnoticeable with no need to shoot in crop mode.

Per my understanding, you would have to buy a Nikonos RS 13mm and a Sony 50mm f/1.8, send both to Isaac along with a $1000 fee, and he would take apart the 13mm, mount parts of it in the Sony lens, and other parts of it in a custom housing adapter to create, effectively, a small dome port. However, as he has already posted, the current conversion is available for Nauticam N100 and SeaFrogs 90mm mounts, so your N85 would require additional work, and, most crucially, a6600 being a crop sensor camera, you won't get the full angle of view. Seeing as the whole process would cost north of $3500, I don't think it's worthwhile unless you're shooting full frame. If you really really want it, consider swapping to an A7CII or something similar.

Just set up my budget SeaFrogs rig for another liveaboard trip. It's a generic carbon fiber float arm going between a triple clamp on right handle and another triple clamp on the cold shoe, which is also holding the focus light. Both computers (Shearwater Perdix AI and Aeris Elite T3) are linked to the same transmitter; on a dive one of them is on my wrist, the other is on the camera. On day dives Perdix goes on the wrist, on night dives it's the other way around, since the Aeris doesn't have a backlight.

Canon 60mm macro is an EF-S (APS-C) lens; I don't know how large it's image circle actually is, but I doubt it will cover an FF sensor. I use it on a Sony A6300 with a Metabones IV and I find it much faster than Sony 90mm, but prone to indefinite hunting. However, recently I updated the Metabones adapter firmware from v65 to v71, and it seems to have drastically improved it's performance on land. I'm currently heading to a blackwater-focused liveaboard trip, so hopefully I'll be able to report on its underwater performance in a week or so. No experience with Sony 50mm, as I don't own one. I tried the 90mm on blackwater and found it impossibly slow, but I understand that it performs much better with newer bodies such as A7RV and A1. I do use it on regular macro dives.

Unless you have unlimited money and limited time in which to spend it, I don't really see the value proposition in going from a D500 to a Sony, at least underwater. The difference in size is pretty minimal, and the D500 is still one of the best underwater cameras ever made, having class-leading autofocus and a library of lenses well-suited to underwater photography. The money it would cost to switch to an A1 or an A7RV rig could fund a liveaboard trip... or three.

No, Mediterranean. It's the coolant water discharge from Orot Rabin power station in Hadera.

I'll try to quote:

If your camera supports it, maybe try using a housed phone as a monitor/remote control? This thread indicates that it works: https://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?/topic/71511-use-smartphone-as-monitor/

Thank you; I guess that rules it out as an option.

True. In my case, the primary drive for upgrade is autofocus performance on blackwater dives. It's effortless in wide-angle, somewhat challenging in macro, but supremely frustrating in blackwater. The Sony 90mm lens I found absolutely unusable for this (I know it works well on newer bodies, but not on mine), and Canon EF-S 60mm on Metabones IV is generally fast enough to work, but has trouble locking focus - I can see it hunt back and forth, with the subject fading in and out of clear view on the screen. That said, recently I found that my adapter is still getting updates from the manufacturer, and updating it from v65 to v71 firmware produced a major improvement in land testing - I'm going to find out next week if it will help out under blackwater conditions.

Just curious, if you don't mind me asking, what is the diameter and length of this viewfinder's mount without the Sea & Sea adapter? I've been wondering about adapting one to a SeaFrogs housing, which has a 30mm diameter x 10mm deep opening for a viewfinder.

Yeah, that fresnel head output does not look good. Godox sells a separate round flash head (H200R), which is not mentioned in the review that you linked, but it probably won't fit the housing.

Understood - that's what I figured was the case; thank you for the confirmation. I guess this mode is only usable with strobes that can do 'dumb' slave TTL.

Thank you. While at it, perhaps you could shine some light on an odd issue I encountered recently. I'm using a UW-Technics converter to trigger my Retra Pro strobes, and it has a mode where you manually set the strobe power in camera menus, while the strobes themselves are in STTL, and the trigger generates light pulses of appropriate length to cause the strobes to flash at required power. I understand that in Canon/Nikon cameras this power can be set directly in the 1/128...1/1 range, but on my Sony a6300, there is no direct manual control of flash power, so it uses flash compensation setting (-3.0...+3.0 EV range) to range between 1/64 to full power. The -3 (1/64), -2 (1/32), -1 (1/16) and 0 (1/8) settings appear to work as expected, but +1 (1/4) and +2 (1/2) positions don't appear to be any brighter than 0, while +3 (full power) is noticeably dimmer. If I set the flash power knob to -3, which gives me the brightest exposure in this mode, I can just about match 1/4 manual power, but no more. I understand that in TTL mode, the strobe expects a pre-flash followed by a main flash - is it possible that there's some bug in v4.5 that causes it to truncate the pre-flash under some circumstances?

Does it have to be this super expensive though? I mean, yeah, you could drop $$$$$ on WACPs, EMWLs, etc, but I'm looking at upgrading from my Sony a6300, which I got back in 2017, and a slightly used a6700 body is going to cost me somewhere around $1000-1100, while a new SeaFrogs housing, once it comes out, if it's priced identical to their a6600 housing, will be slightly under $700 with a basic flat port for use with my 16-50mm and UWL-09F wet lens. Add $150 for a long port and zoom gear for my 90mm macro (also fits Canon 60mm which I use for blackwater), and I'm still under $2k. I can keep the UWT trigger and Leak Sentinel from my current setup, and possibly get a second-hand Tokina 10-17mm, 3D print a port adapter and zoom gear for my 4" mini-dome, and get extra wide-angle capability. Yeah, it wouldn't be the absolute best in terms of either IQ or ergonomics, but it gets most of the way there for a fraction of the cost.

To be fair, those Canon and Nikon strobes that Subal is housing are in the 60-80WS power range, which is substantially less than the 200WS that Godox quotes for the AD200. While no single number tells the whole story, I think WS is a better proxy for a strobe's overall power than GN, as it is subject to fewer variables. In fact the specs on Godox website are impressively detailed; I wish underwater strobe manufacturers were as open with theirs - I don't recall, for example, any of them publishing t.1 or t.5 numbers for their units.

Earlier today I remembered Ultramax strobes that were a reasonably popular budget option some years ago, and wondered what had happened to that product line, as I haven't seen any mention of it in a while. Opened up Google and ended up surprised seeing this: https://www.ultramaxdive.com/products/underwater-strobe-housing-for-godox-ad200-pro-pocket-flash I know that housing some Canon/Nikon strobes used to be a reasonably popular option back in the day (before my time), but this is the first time I see a modern offering of this type. Are there any advantages to it over a dedicated underwater unit? At 200WS it seems to be quite powerful, and the total cost is fairly reasonable, but it's bigger than the old YS-250Pro and much heavier to boot. When it comes to travel weight, I think you could pack a land flash or two, a pair of underwater strobes, and still come out ahead... am I missing anything?

I'm guessing to properly expose the background with very limited natural light. 1/40th is at the limit of reasonable shutter speed, so it's either a wider aperture, or higher ISO. I personally would sacrifice corners and go for something like f/5.6 or f/4 at lower ISO, but it's a matter of personal preference.

Question regarding firmware revisions - I see that the latest version listed for Retra Pro/Prime is v4.3, but my Retra Pro strobes are reporting as running v4.5. Was there a version that got pulled/reverted?