Barmaglot

I just got a shiny new Sony a6700 and realized that my old free Capture One Express 11 for Sony can't process its RAWs. Phase One is offering a perpetual license for Capture One Pro at 60% off, for a total of $128. Anybody here using it? What does it offer for that money over free/open-source alternatives such as darktable, Raw Therapee, etc? I don't really need much besides tweaking levels and colors, sharpening, rotating and cropping, although some tools to reduce the occasional backscatter would be nice, along with intelligent masking for editing blackwater photos.

I just got a new (well, slightly used) A6700 and tried it with Sony Creators' App on my phone via WiFi (on land; the housing is still on the way). Panning around, with the phone held immediately above the camera, I can see a little bit of lag between the camera LCD and the phone screen, but it's perfectly workable. I don't have a way of measuring it, but eyeballing, I'd say in the 100-200ms range. It's possible that my tolerance for lag is higher than average though, as my day job involves lots of work on remote systems over links with significant latency.

The o-ring is for keeping water from leaking out, not for preventing its ingress. The idea is that you attach the lens while submerged (or pre-dive in a rinse tank) and then you can shoot splits with it.

At three meters even a real strobe will have a very limited effect. An LED light will be invisible. In my experience, everyone who makes a "plastic pipe" type snoot either gives it up altogether after a few tries, or moves to a proper snoot solution like the Retra LSD.

With the Nikonos RS system having been discontinued almost three decades ago, after just four years of probably low rate production, I doubt there's a pile of pristine 13mm lenses out there waiting to be resold. I wonder if any of the Chinese lens companies like Venus Optics or 7Artisans would be up to manufacturing a knock-off copy; they seem to be quite wiling to develop and produce very niche products like the the Laowa probe lens.

Do you have a Wetpixel account? If yes - https://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?/topic/71473-backup-of-photovideo-files-without-a-computer/ If no, links from that thread: https://www.newsshooter.com/2023/09/28/clouzen-tainer-all-in-one-portable-backup-storage-review/ https://www.clouzen.net/product https://github.com/outdoorbits/little-backup-box

The leaked image doesn't show the front element, but I would be quite surprised if it's not in the 62-72mm filter size range, which would preclude compatibility with wet lenses. The 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II uses an 82mm filter.

I wouldn't bother with Z-240s; not nearly enough power for what you're looking for. Maybe look at well-used YS-250s, or the new SUPE D-Pro. Yes, they're huge, and this runs counter to your requirement for compact size, but all your other requirements pretty much scream MORE POWER, so you'll have to compromise somewhere. For the reference, here's a YS-250 sitting on a table next to my Retra Pro, which has a supercharger in the back and a reduction ring with a reflector in the front. The bare strobe is just the part that is covered by the neoprene jacket. Inon Z-330s are sized similar to that. null

Edit: forum ate the text of my post, leaving only the image. Weird, trying to retype. Just saw this on the DiveVolk website - https://www.divevolkdiving.com/products/divevolk-sealink-contact-type-underwater-wifi-signal-transmitter This looks like a very interesting option. As far as I can tell, pros of this are: Cheap - at $230 for the SeaTouch 4 MAX housing and $200 for the waveguide, it's well below even the cheapest underwater HDMI monitors (Weefine WED-5). Even if you don't want to risk your main phone, you can get a dedicated one for $100-200 by using a mid-range model from a few years ago. No housing penetrations - fewer o-rings to maintain, and it can be used with housings that lack an M14/M16 port for an HDMI cable such as AOI and SeaFrogs. Can control the camera from the phone screen instead of housing buttons. Can be used as a standalone system, for example if you want to go snorkeling and don't want the hassle of your bulky main rig. Counterbalanced by cons: Lag - I don't know how bad it would be, but it's gotta be worse than an HDMI link, given the need to encode and decode a WiFi signal. Ditto for frame rate and resolution. Single available size - bigger and bulkier than some of the smaller dedicated monitors, smaller than others. No recording capability. Requires camera support for WiFi remote control. Very short range - no way to use as a polecam. Given that I'm in the SeaFrogs ecosystem, which makes access to 45-degree viewfinders and HDMI monitors difficult to impossible, I'm quite tempted to try it out.

Yeah, I wouldn't try to light stuff up with strobes past maybe three meters or so, and that's at a reasonable depth to occlude natural sunlight. Example, taken at ~15 meters depth, shooting Retra Pro strobes at full power, camera was set to f/11, 1/50s, ISO 400, the rock was about two meters tall to give you an idea of the scale of the shot. You can see where the strobe light falls off and stuff starts getting green. In shallow water, you get much more sunlight, and since the strobes' job is to overpower the natural light, their effective range drops significantly - you have to shoot at very small apertures and low ISO values, and this correspondingly cuts into the strobe output as well. For example, this jellyfish drifted across me at safety stop (~5 meters) and I had to stop down to f/22, 1/160s, ISO 200 (probably a mistake; I should've used ISO 100) and crank up the strobe power: At a more open aperture and lower strobe power, it ended up looking completely washed out. In order to light stuff up with strobes right below the surface, you'll have occlude as much of natural light as you can, crank up strobe power, and get right up close to the subject. Forget twenty feet; a single foot is probably the limit there, maybe two feet.

Sounds like you're going to be shooting right at or near the surface. In those circumstances, I think you can skip strobes altogether, as you will have very little water filtering sunlight and mucking up the color balance.

It's a lot better of an idea in theory than in practice, those diaphragms are quite fragile and prone to breakage. Also, if you want any shape other than a circle, you need a mask.

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: