Davide DB

It was released a few days ago, a really well-made short film with very beautiful cinematography. From the synopsis of the film: Four years ago, Patagonia produced another feature film about salmon. This one is a real punch in the gut.

From Youtube author's comments: @Barmaglot did you do blackwater in Andaman sea?

Maybe @bghazzal can give you some info 😉

Where was the photo taken?

They are like pets...

Which kind of fish are those? Sturgeons? Initially I thought they were sharks 😵

Hi Brett, welcome back to the bright side 😉

Welcome to the club 😞 In this case I believe it is because the lens has 10 times the surface area of the gopro and consequently the likelihood of picking up material in sediment-rich waters such as rivers and lakes is much greater. Also the fact that it is a wet lens exposes it to the known problems of other big sisters such as WWL and EMWL. Then in my case something else happens inside the gopro... Sorry I did not shared any other example but therlse are very busy days.

So you are lucky that you don't have to spend all that money 😉

Not by default. We should arrange some DIY attachment.

This could be an explanation. Maybe the front 52 mm adapter and wet lens reduce the heat exchange. Good to know then. I couldn't find any reliable source stating it. Problem is that trout spawning last about one month so there's no time to experiment. I got the AOI lens few days ago and the next full moon everything will be over.

Actually in the subsequent test, we never found fogging on the gopro lens... only the first time because I dislogded it by mistake. I would have tested it without protective lens but I couldnt find reliable info on being 100% waterproof. Someone says it's waterproof but not as before. That's means nothing to me. BTW given that my wet lens holds on the gopro protective lens, I should remove the glass and keeping the frame. Mistery

Angle warping while panning is an extreme FOV consequence too. Even with my WWL-1 I get warping if I pan in full wide. I always zoom in a bit for a moving shot. IMHO the safest FOV for panning is that of a 24 mm lens. I should also see the same effect on other Gopros used with the Digipower and instead it only happens with the AOI lens. I currently have 3 Digipowers, 2 used with Gopro 11's and one used with an old 5. The GP5 at 2.7K@50p shoots for almost 6 hours. I also swapped GP 11's and the defect follows the lens. Then I have other Gopro 8's that I use for short sessions with their standard battery that lasts about 50 minutes in freezing water.

I found on the fly these two videos shot simultaneously by the two GoPro 11s about 50 cm apart shooting from different angles this rockfall. 50 cm depth set with flat color and WB 5500 K. The difference in color should not be surprising. Unfortunately, you only need to change camera angles by a few degrees and the brightness and clarity of the water changes from day to night. It depends on the type of sediment flowing in the river. But look at the difference in definition on the rocks and leaves of the aquatic plant. In the next few days if I can find some more meaningful shots. We have TB of footage and it is not easy.

My use case is so peculiar and I have no idea who will find it useful, but I write this post anyway to demonstrate how a seemingly simple thing can become a conundrum. As I described in a previous post, to use the AOI lens with the Digipower battery pack I used a 52mm filter holder. The first session went wrong because we found condensation inside the GoPro's protective lens. When we checked it, we realised that the weight in the air of the lens was able to dislodge the gopro's protective lens and lift the small oring. All it took was a tiny drop of water and the heat generated by the GoPro did the rest. The whole thing holds on the protective lens of the GoPro so great care is taken even when screwing it in and placing it in the water with two hands. Despite the care taken and the fact that the GoPro's protective lens had no fogging or condensation, subsequent sessions still had blurry parts that began to appear after about an hour of shooting. The mystery deepened. Comparing the bayonet mount with my screw mount, I realised that in mine, the back of the wet lens and the back of the gopro's protective lens are practically attached while in the original bayonet one there are a few millimetres of space/water (in my Backscatter version there is space to slip in red slide filters). I thought that the two lenses with the temperature variations and tolerances would come into contact, eliminating the water gap and producing that strange blurring. Rummaging around, I found a 52 mm male/female adapter that can act as a spacer. I also drilled two small holes in the filter holder to make sure no air bubbles were left inside. I also partially covered the small holes with tape because I had noticed a small purple glare on some of the shots. In short, I lost count of the number of hours lost to get the whole thing working. Result? Despite all those arrangements, after an hour the image starts to degrade and blurs/blurs appear in various places. There is no condensation in the GoPro lens cover and the reason remains a mystery. Another major annoyance, the ability to attract various crap floating in the river current to the dome. We have tried various methods, dish soap and Rainox but no dice. Hence the decision to stop using it for this task. Meanwhile, the other Gopros grind out hours without any particular problems except for the mediocre quality of the footage. A GoPro 11/12 shooting at 4K@50p on the surface gets hot and shuts down after a few minutes. We are doing continuous shooting sessions of more than 4 hours. The temperature of the river is 9 degrees and when we retrieve them they are cold. One possible explanation perhaps the water gap in the filter holder heats up and creates this effect. Yet it seems strange because they are two aluminum rings with considerable heat exchange capacity. or maybe the water gets contaminated? The only regret is not being able to predict this earlier. It would not have been difficult to design and print a bayonet mount for the GoPro mounted on the Digipower but there are only a few days of shooting left now. I'm afraid it will remain a mystery!

Wow I have to investigate this solution but I guess it's for the bayonet attachment. Nothing in your configuration I guess... Except I'm having a lot of problems with sediments sticking on the glass. We tried with dish soap and with Rainox with no results. I'm leaving the lens in a river ripping current for 5 hours runtime... Suggestions are welcome!

Maybe it was for the Inon? This AOI is a small WWL-1 and it needs the water between it and the Gopro lens. I'll try it later but it seems to me that everything is blurry in the air. I'm sure it all depends on my particular (to say the least) use case and anyone using a gopro underwater should definitely use it. At 200 euros it is a bargain! As soon as I have time I will explain more about how I used it, the problems I had and a couple of clips shot in the river.

Experiments continue with the AOI Lens and Digipower battery for long shooting sessions in the river. A camera trap, basically. The result is a bitter-sweet mixture 🙂 On the one hand, the quality of shooting with this lens is outstanding compared to those with the flat lens of the standard Gopro. On the other, the modifications I had to make to mount it in my particular conditions of use meant that almost all of the footage had to be discarded due to various flaws: spots and fogging appears ata some point. We have various theories as to why these flaws occur, and we also made some modifications but the risk of having an unusable single-event shot made us reluctantly decide not to use it for this purpose anymore. We will use it in shorter 40-minute sessions with its standard bayonet mount. Hoping that everything goes as expected.

I see that Paul Humann is mentioned several times in our list of books for identifying sea creatures. Sadly, Paul Humann left us a few days ago. R.I.P. https://www.reef.org/remembering-paul-humann

I see that there are several lights on the market that offer strobe function. I am skeptical about the real usefulness of this solution but I leave that to the photographers. However, it is already difficult to mix light temperature from two different strobes let alone a strobe and a light. For video, working with a single light is difficult but you should tell us whether your photographic subjects are macro or wide and whether you shoot in temperate waters or shallow in clear tropical waters. 8000 real lumens may be low and if you are doing macro, a wide light (120°) illuminates practically nothing.

Link to this thread added to our working and tested project list

I updated the first post with the latest links from this thread. If you want your project added just post a public valid link here. Thank you all, this is becoming a terrific useful list!

IIRC @RichN has fallen into compulsive shoppig and can give you feedback on how it works 🙂 On that thread I remember other members were using their smartphone.

We should hide this thread 😉

Wow! Looking at my footage of the 11 with AOI lens and the other 11 without it is like comparing a gopro 3 with a 11.