Barmaglot

Shooting macro, every now and then, I encounter a light-shy critter - saron shrimp, banded pipefish, some crabs, etc. I have a red mode on my focus light, but actually using it is near impossible - at least on my Sony a6300 + 90mm macro lens combo, I basically get a solid red screen with no distinguishing features. Pointing it here and there while mashing the focus-on button I get some darker blotches but nothing identifiable, so getting a shot is basically a matter of blind luck. I'm currently transitioning to a new a6700, and playing with its features, I discovered that if I set the white balance to a custom value off the red light (it ended up reading something like 3600K), then - at least while playing with it dry, in a darkened room, under a red light - the on-screen picture is a lot clearer. The resulting shot is extremely green-tinted, but when shooting raw, it doesn't really matter. However, and this is even more frustrating, this only works when live shoot effect is set to ON - when using settings appropriate for macro (f/16, 1/160s, ISO 100) this produces a black screen, since it previews the exposure as it would be without a flash, and if I set live shoot effect to OFF, then the white balance value is ignored along with everything else for the purposes of framing display, and everything goes super red and indistinguishable again. Are there any ways to make using red focus lights easier on modern Sony mirrorless?

Looking forward to hear of the results. All the reviews of FE 50mm that I've seen were done many years ago, when it was first released, so it'd be good to know what its comparative performance is with newer cameras.

Yes, but @ChipBPhoto is looking for something wider than 90mm to use on his A1. Yes, a 60mm lens on FF would be like using a 30mm on M43 - and as it happens, the 30mm is the most popular blackwater lens on M43 cameras. The questions which stand (and thus far haven't been answered) are: How large is the actual image circle of the Zeiss 50mm in terms of full-frame coverage? Not in APS-C mode, but in full-frame mode. For Canon EF-S 60mm this is known - full coverage at 1:1, slight corner vignetting at longer distances. How good is its focusing speed and reliability vis a vis Sony FE 50mm and Canon EF-S 60mm? And again, the wider AoV is not for shooting larger subjects at a similar distance, but for easier target acquisition at distance before moving in to closer distance for similar framing. The FE 50mm would be the obvious solution for a 'wider than 90mm macro lens', but it suffers from limited minimum aperture (f/16) and has a very poor reputation for focusing speed, which may or may not be alleviated by the newer-generation autofocus in the A1 body, hence @ChipBPhoto looking at alternatives.

How would you rate their focusing speed (traversing between far and close focus, locking on to subject) in air in different lighting conditions, comparing against each other?

Wait wait wait, besides you and me, how many board members were on that trip? LOL, I really should talk to people more... This is actually quite similar to my experience on Sony a6300. Before I used to use a Weefine Smart Focus 1000 for focus lighting, and found that it really struggled to lock focus unless I added the light from both Retra Pro modeling lights and often the spotting torch as well (I'd hold it with my ring and pinky fingers of the left hand, pointing it at the subject, as the rest of the hand was holding up the camera handle). This trip I put my old Archon D36V on the cold shoe, and found that focusing got a lot easier. Still not perfect, but not as much of a struggle as it used to be. It's kinda worrying though, that a brand-new flagship body is exhibiting similar issues to an eight-year-old camera that retailed at a quarter of its cost.

The FE 50mm macro lens suffers from a reputation of being very slow. Whether or not this reputation is well deserved, I can't comment, not having used it, but it's there. It also have a fairly limiting minimum aperture of f/16. When I started doing blackwater, my only macro lens was the 90mm, and on my a6300 body, I quickly found it to be unusable, and my search for a better solution led me to Canon EF-S 60mm macro. That lens focuses quite fast, but tends to hunt in less than very good lighting - I have a Weefine Smart Focus 1000 focus light, and I found that I needed to amplify it with my strobes' modeling lights, and frequently my spotting torch as well. On my last trip, I put a 5400lm video light on the housing cold shoe, and this actually worked quite well - I encountered almost no hunting in one and a half blackwater dives that I did. The Canon 60mm, at least on older bodies, focuses much faster than the Sony 90mm, and its image circle provides almost complete coverage of a full-frame sensor - there's slight vignetting in the corners that disappears as you get close to minimum focus distance. The question is, how does the Sony-Zeiss 50mm compare to it in these criteria - focus speed, and sensor coverage. The newer bodies (A1, A7RV, possibly A7CII/A7CR) have made the Sony 90mm a viable option for blackwater, but plenty of people are still using A7IV and older cameras. The shorter focal length is for easier target acquisition. You have a wider field of view to acquire your subject from a moderate distance, center them in the frame, lock focus, then move in for maximum feasible magnification. The 90-105mm lenses are a bit narrow in this regard; you have to aim them much more precisely for that initial lock-on - many blackwater photographers consider the '60mm on full-frame' to be the sweet spot between magnification capability of 90-105mm lenses, and wide field of view of 30-40mm lenses. I have personally tried Sony 30mm f/3.5 macro on APS-C and found it too wide - it's easy to do the initial acquisition, but achieving proper magnification requires getting in so close that tracking and lighting become an issue.

The idea is to use the APS-C lens in full-frame mode, without cropping. The 90mm has a fairly narrow field of view, making it challenging to use on blackwater dives, and the FE 50mm is slow. The Canon EF-S 60mm when used on full frame only produces slight vignetting in the corners, which is immaterial for blackwater shots, hence my question as to how big is the actual image circle of the Sony-Zeiss 50mm.

How big is the image circle on the Zeiss lens? I know that the Canon EF-S 60mm has only slight vignetting on full frame, but I haven't seen any tests with the Zeiss 50mm.

If you ever end up taking it on a blackwater dive, please sound off with the results. I'm curious as to how it would perform vis a vis an adapted Canon 60mm. I'm currently transitioning from an a6300 to a6700, and while the 90mm has received a very substantial boost in autofocus performance, the Canon 60mm still suffers from hunting, so I'm pondering selling it and getting a Zeiss 50mm instead - while the 90mm autofocus can probably handle blackwater with the new body, its field of view is somewhat too narrow on APS-C when everything is moving around.

Yes. The Smiling Seahorse liveaboard does at least one per trip, sometimes several when there is enough interest and conditions allow. They also run one blackwater-focused trip per season, where they do a blackwater dive each evening, sometimes two. As a matter of fact, I'm coming back from a Myanmar (Mergui Archipelago) trip right now; we did two blackwater dives - one near Black Rock, another... somewhere, but sure exactly where. On the Thailand side, they usually do it in the Koh Bon/Koh Tachai area, there's about 70-80 meters of depth there.

There are multiple EF to X mount adapters (the Fringer one seems to get the best reviews), so Tokina 10-17mm should be possible. 15-45mm zoom works with WWL-C, and 18-55mm f/2.8-4 works with WACP, albeit in a limited zoom range.

Why? You shoot a fisheye lens for the fisheye perspective; why get rid of it?

Oh, didn't notice that... Yeah, that's a deal-breaker.

There's a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 that Nauticam has on the WACP-1 chart, but not on FCP chart. I wonder if that's because it doesn't work with FCP for some reason, or simply because they haven't tested it yet.

Have you seen the new 24-50 that Sony announced? Supposed to start shipping in May.

I've found that Retra's reflectors help a lot in marginal visibility conditions. For example, this was shot in marginal (not terrible, but not great, probably <10m if memory serves me right) conditions from about 2-3 meters away using the 90mm (f/5.6, 1/160s, ISO 100): The reflectors form two very sharply defined beams which you can converge on the subject and avoid the backscatter between lens and target, and shallow depth of field prevents the particles from showing up.

I mean, it's not featured on Nauticam's charts, so there's gotta be some reason they left it out. It's possible that they consider the 230mm or 250mm domes too large for the typical APS-C users, or there could be some physical barrier. Looking at other manufacturers, Isotta doesn't have any domes larger than 8" (which they do recommend for 10-18mm), Aquatica charts are almost nonexistent and Ikelite also tops out at 8". Sea & Sea don't have any Sony crop housings, but for some reason they do have SEL1018 on their system chart, with a range of port options including their 230mm dome (with 20mm extension). Easydive seem to list every dome they have as compatible with both 10-18mm and 10-20mm, from 95mm microdome to 230mm glass and 240mm acrylic, but only 125mm and 160mm domes are marked as 'recommended'.

Aside from being cumbersome and expensive, is there any reason why a 230mm dome couldn't be used with either 10-18mm or 10-20mm?

I've never been to to California, much less dived there, but I've used the 90mm on a6300 in conditions where I could barely see my outstretched hands. You can see that there's so much stuff in the water that it is getting in the way even at macro distances - this sea moth was maybe an inch long. Still, this was an extreme case, and at when shooting macro, visibility doesn't matter so much.

Pete Atkinson did a mini-test of that a few years back, on a Nikon Z50, comparing a Sigma 8-16, WWL-C on 16-50Z and a Tokina 10-17mm. https://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?/topic/67658-angle-of-view-comparison-wwl-c-and-16-50z-with-sigma-8-16-nauticam-85-dome

14-42mm + wet lens is also an option; a WWL-1 will focus right down to the glass. I don't think 170mm dome will work well for CFWA, as the dome's size will work against getting the lens close up to a subject.

Yes, all wet lenses currently available on the market give you significant barrel distortion ("fisheye effect"). WWL-C, AFAIK, is identical to WWL-1 in this regard. On wildlife images it is fine and often even desirable; on wrecks, it's a matter of personal taste - some people don't mind it, others prefer keeping straight lines straight. To me, the corners of your 10-20mm image look just fine - I mean, it's just sand and rubble there, who cares? - but if you want to improve them, a bigger dome would help. Another option is to use manual focusing to shift the focus point closer to the camera - as I understand it, autofocus is biased towards putting more DoF behind your focus point (I've seen figures of 2/3 behind 1/3 in front), which further degrades your corners. Using manual focus can alter this behavior, although looking at Nauticam's port chart, there is no native option for it - I suppose that if you use an N85 to N120 port adapter with knob (as they specify for the 180mm glass dome), you could print your own gear to connect the focus ring to the adapter knob, while zoom ring is connected to the housing's knob.

Not quite a wreck, but here is a comparison shot of WWL-1, WACP-C, WACP-1 and a 16-35mm behind a 230mm dome: https://web.facebook.com/NauticamThailand/posts/pfbid02Rx7a3XcKJzRSHnjVT9bx5G7XPVNBmVY1GpuxP24QNRqHCAAKpC6c4hbvWWYwvzn7l?_rdc=1&_rdr If you're concerned about corner sharpness with 10-18mm/10-20mm, you could use a larger dome such as 180mm.

There was a thread discussing this back on Wetpixel, and the general consensus is that it works, but there are some caveats. Monitors in general are significantly more bulky than viewfinders, and add a lot of drag, which gets significant if you have to swim against a current. They also add a bit of lag into the display pipeline, which may or may not be tolerable for you. Weefine monitors in particular have some rather unfavorable opinions on them from users, see these threads: As a budget alternative, Divevolk offers a WiFi extender kit for their SeaTouch phone housings. This would allow you to connect to your camera using the Sony Creators' App and even operate it from the phone screen. Downsides are increased lag and reduced frame rate, plus the extender must be mounted over the housing's display window and thus block part of it. Using WiFi also cuts into the camera's battery life.

Have you considered Fujifilm? They're kind of unique in that their top-end is medium-format rather than full-frame, so they're not afraid of their APS-C lineup cannibalizing full-frame sales, and put their best tech into APS-C (X-H2, X-H2S, X-T5).