Davide DB

Thanks @wydeangleYes, same questions as @bghazzal. Do you remember which AF did you use? It seems a center frame CAF and it loses focus when the crab moves on the frame borders.

Yes, Nauticam confirmed me the GH6 housing is OK. Camera bodies are identical.

DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro camera is already registered with the FCC... Stay tuned 😜

This wave of innovation reminds me of the epochal change that took place in the transition from film to digital. Not everyone emerged intact. I remember very well that some underwater photographers who were very popular with film almost disappeared with digital. The transition to digital forced them to post-produce the photos themselves (light room), whereas with film, post-production was the sole prerogative of the development lab (dark room). Now it seems normal to know how to use a computer and talk about memory cards, digital storage, hard disks, ssd but the impact on digital immigrants has been merciless. Only those who were able to quickly learn the new digital skills survived. And age has counted for a lot and many young photographers have appeared on the scene.

On the generation of new images, you are absolutely right, but what I was referring to were the computational photography tools we already use when taking photos (with a smartphone or camera) or in post production. As you mentioned the OM-1 and beyond already has built-in tools (pixel shift) that allow you to take huge pictures by combining several shots. The night shot function that all mid to high-end mobile phones have now is another example. On video, the night shot functions of the latest DJI and Insta action cameras are scary. In post production, most of the big new features in the April version of Lightroom are all about A.I. (actually computational photography). Denoise, automatic masks, object removal with missing background generation, are just some of the new features that will certainly also have an impact on the post production of underwater photography in the medium term. Of course, they are only tools and perhaps the difference will be seen by those who know how to use them skilfully and, above all, intelligently.

This 3 part article is even better and the opening is terrific: https://m.dpreview.com/articles/9828658229/computational-photography-part-i-what-is-computational-photography It's impossible to imagine a smartphone presentation today without dancing around its camera. Google makes Pixel shoot in the dark, Huawei zooms like a telescope, Samsung puts lidars inside, and Apple presents the new world's roundest corners. Illegal level of innovations happening here. DSLRs, on the other hand, seem half dead. Sony showers everybody with a new sensor-megapixel rain every year, while manufacturers lazily update the minor version number and keep lying on piles of cash from movie makers. I have a $3000 Nikon on my desk, but I take an iPhone on my travels. Why?

Maybe this article gives some insight on a term somehow 'exotic'. There are some interesting comments too. https://petapixel.com/computational-photography/ P.S. some of the new Adobe tools you are already using for postproduction, fall under the 'computational photography' term...

Excellent summary. We are an extremist niche here. Photography Taliban and we are definitely not indicative of the market. Simply put, we are at the edge of Bell curve. As you wrote, you see more and more people taking a smartphone underwater. Action cameras are everywhere. And while the quality of the videos and photosuck for us, for the majority of people they are perfect. We have already discussed this several times, including on WP. There is a global orientation that we can call 'low resolution' Lo-Fi. People are also looking for new ways to interpret reality authentically: film cameras, o⁵ĥĥld point-and-shoot cameras, old camcorders. Music on vinyl and fuck the CD. This is the other side of the Bell curve. In the middle are smartphones and action cameras. But wherever you are in the Bell curve, if you want to improve the quality of your images, A.I. will take care of it. Have you seen what A.I. is capable of generating by providing a source image? The problem is that someone will soon have to pay for the huge datacentres needed to run A.I. and the business model is not sustainable in the long run. Once we have these functions available in the processors of our phones, that's it. There will be no more blurred edges, loss of resolution, chromatic aberrations and other defects. So in my opinion the next big step will be computational photography. The only losers in this evolution will be us with our high-end devices. The market will shrink even further. And the prices? P.S. I love your Cressi Rondine fins

Probably yes but... I'm still waiting for someone to show up saying "hey I used animal eye AF on this clip, here are the results!" 😁

IMO DJI has the biggest technological advantage over its competitors. It has crazy technology not only in drones but also in gimbals and cinema cameras. I don't know if you have seen what the DJI Ronin 4D is capable of. Maybe they assess that the market is not mature for such a technological investment on an action camera or... we will have news at the next production cycle.

It is a general phenomenon that has almost wiped out the forums. But videomakers have been swallowed up by YouTube and the social media mania more than others. I know several professional videographers and they are actually more jealous than photographers about their methods and tricks of the trade. let's see if we are lucky

In land shooting the issue is debated. In film, the problem doesn't really exist: you have a team, manual focus is handled by a professional focus puller. Conversely, automatic focus is particularly felt in all those run & gun situations or for one man bands in weddings and events in general. Then youtubers and the v-logging craze did the rest. Of course, footage like this without an Animal Eye AF would be exclusive to the BBC or a few other camera operators and instead... All the underwater videographers I know work more or less as I described above but the danger of living in a bubble is always lurking 😉 That is why I am curious for feedback here.

Digging the net I found another example, always from the same user.

Guys I have the impression that this thread has reached a dead end. Everyone has had a chance to express their preferences on flashes and battery packs and in particular on the novelty introduced by Retra. We also had a direct feedback from Oskar. It is not often that we have the privilege of a manufacturer participating in the forum.... Long story short: now we all have an informed opinion and try to remember the old adage: agree to disagree 😉

As example this is a rare video showing as Canon R5 animal eye AF works on fish (but on photography) IDK What the result would be on a 30" clip... Here it works but on a single static animal

Yes, I'm at the window too 😉 Given that Sony AF is often considered as a reference I'm curious to read/see what's possible to achieve in a real scenario. Plenty of Sony/Canon uw shooters out there but it's not clear if they are really exploiting their camera AF capabilities or just working in a traditional way like me. As I wrote in another post, it is considered rude to ask a photographer/filmmaker what he/she shot with and how he/she did it 🙂 Discussing autofocus with some professional underwater filmmakers, their reaction was a mixture of disgust and wonder. They all work exclusively in manual focus. But cinema cameras often do not have evolved AF or you simply cannot rely on AF for important shots.

I am an old filmmaker who "still" uses a GH5M2 with CDAF. Never had problems in WA or medium close shots but I only use single AF configured on the AF-Lock button. I lock the focus on the subject or, on moving subjects, I lock the focus at an intermediate value and try to stay as hyperfocal as possible. In all mirrorless housings it is impossible to operate the manual focus ring to follow the subject: the gear is so tenfold that one turn moves the focus by very little. Only on cinema housings is there a more "humane" relationship between turns of the housing ring and the focus barrel on the lens. In practice the focus ring is dedicated exclusively to macro shooting and even there it is necessary to have a basic focus with AF and only then to work in manual for micro adjustments. I must say that in static macro conditions with good lighting I can also work only in Single AF by using a small area and moving it to the relevant point with the slider and then use Lock-AF. What is different with modern intelligent PDAF systems? Could we work in CAF by following the eye of a fish, a nudibranch or the eye of a hermit crab as it moves in macro? Could we reliably track the face of a diver swimming from the blue toward us?

The autofocus technology used in the latest generations of mirrorless cameras has made great strides. Established technologies such as PDAF (Phase Detect Auto Focus) have been joined by the ever-present A.I. (it's so cool today to have this acronym even on breakfast corn flakes) with algorithms that actually exploit huge amounts of data through machine learning. It is therefore possible to speed-up sensor's data analysis and recognize people, faces, eyes, dogs, cats, birds, cars, trains and who knows what else in the future. As for underwater photography, there are countless tutorials on the best autofocus settings for both WA and macro. Even here the topic has been addressed several times for the now very popular Sony A7Rs. As far as underwater video is concerned there is practically nothing on the Internet, and I do not think the photography tips are always directly applicable. I was discussing this on Youtube and was told that typically those who make videos are less technical (users are more casual), all on automatic or they know their camera well and don't need tutorials. Will this be true? Let's use this thread to tell how you use autofocus in video, what is your use case, camera and how do you find it.

Imagine if a smartphone manufacturer would take only the photo subsystem of a top of gamma smartphone and put it in an action camera...

However, action cam (and other) technology is years behind smartphones that already have PDAF long ago and beyond.

Exactly. I follow this crazy guy on YT. Always some out of the box content He made this video a while back and solved the focus problem with a diopter.

I see they have no extension (.jpg) so the forum is not able to render them.

Which kind of files are they?

The topic is interesting and complicated. I agree more with Dave. IMO big problems happen during charging. The battery packs have a circuit (Battery Management System) that precisely equalizes the differences between individual cells and also has a cut-off circuit that prevents the batteries from dropping below a certain threshold during discharge. I don't see any problems when using scattered batteries because after use they will be charged individually. Having a single pack is more a matter of convenience than anything else, and in any case we are not talking about huge battery packs like those in video lamps.

I have had several acrylic domes. IMO the big difference is in backlighting. Pointing the camera towards the sun, I have never liked the image rendering compared to glass.