Chris Ross

There are various posts I recall about using the WWL in combo with a CMC. The biggest issue quoted is what to do with the big lump of a WWL when it's not mounted on the port, with some concern about the fact the lens has no way to attach a lanyard. I only recall one person saying they used the WWL/CMC combo and they thought it worked OK. I would add that the quoted field of the the WWL is a 130deg diagonal lens, though the barrel distortion means that horizontal field which reflects what coverage you can achieve is about the same or very slightly wider than a 14mm rectilinear lens. The Horizontal field of a fisheye will be about 145 deg while the WWL will be around 105. You can go close to matching the WWL reach with the 8-15 plus 1.4x or even an adapted Tokina 10-17 but of course you can't add a CMC lens to that setup. You can focus up to the port glass and this allows you to image subjects down to about tennis ball size filling the frame reasonably well for CFWA type shots. The CMC-1 will get you about 0.8x on the 18-45 and it only focuses between 44 and 81mm from the CMC glass, so it's not as easy to work with as a standard macro lens. Whether it suits you likely depends somewhat which way you are leaning with the majority of the subjects you shoot. If it's mostly wide with the occasional macro or occasional wide with mainly variable sized macro. A macro lens with a wide wet lens would probably suit a wider range of macro sized subjects better than using a CMC with a kit zoom.

I don't have specific information, the tightness of fit needed will vary depending the lens in question. The problem you are likely to see if any is vignetting. The good news is you check vignetting on land, so you try out what you have to see if it will work OK for you. It looks like it is supplied with two different thread options to try to accomodate different attachment methods. The part to mount a bayonet attachment to wet lenses is the Nauticam 83214. The backscatter page says it attaches to M67 lenses. Whether you can use it or not depends on the dimensions of the lens you are trying to mount , the thread is located further up the body of the lens on Nauticam wet lenses to get the backend of the lens closer to the port. You could try asking the vendor is the Kraken will work with this adapter?

let us know how you go!

Total bargain and still an extremely capable camera. For that you could add an adapted Canon 8-15 or Tokina 10-17 in a small dome and take it UW for less than the cost of a Nauticam housing for the Z8 or equip it with a fisheye lens and 4" dome and strobes and still be around the price of just the housing.

Yes it is spendy to take anything full frame UW, you can save a lot with a smaller sensor system and IMO it's good enough for what most people us their photos for. Most people don't go with rectilinears and big domes due to the size and hassle for travelling. You can also use less powerful strobes with smaller systems as you don't need to stop down as much. a m43 or an APS_C system would be a massive step up from a go pro for still images. Big animals is generally WWL/WACP or fisheye territory, if you want a compact rig you can use a m43 8mm fisheye lens behind a 4" dome. If you want some flexibility for that shark that won't come close enough a WWL or one of he fisheye zoom options is worth looking at. Looking at some options in Nauticam a Canon R7 housing is $1800 less than a Z8 housing while an OM-1 is $2800 cheaper. The domes are potentially cheaper in smaller formats depending which way you go and in m43 in particular the lenses are significantly smaller lighter and cheaper. I'd suggest throwing together a spreadsheet and pricing up a few systems down to the lenses, domes, zoom gears and strobes in each sensor size range and seeing how you feel when comparing the prices.

I was thinking specifically of flash settings, I assume you are not using R1C1 as that requires specific protocol to intrepret the signals. Presumably you would need to ensure red eye reduction is off and check the various flash settings in the menu. Regarding fibre optics I wasn't suggesting doing that with the subtronic strobes, just suggesting that many new strobes work quite well with TTL over fibre optics. I think the risk factor for new strobe sis quite small, many people are using both the mini flash and UWT riggers to trigger flash units both in manual and TTL. If you decide to go with new strobes juts put up another post asking about strobes that work well with the OM-1.

if you triggering using an on camera flash then either will work, the single connector with two cables may not work so well for a l LED trigger.

I saw some articles that said the optics are the same as the the first version of the 28-70 so i would expect that the it would be the same performance behind the WWL/WACP optics as the existing lens, so the 28-60 would likely still be the better choice.

You didn't say much about what you have the camera set at which can can make a difference. If you set the flash to second curtain sync on the camera you can use that together with a slow shutter speed around 1/2 sec or longer to tell if there is a pre flash as well as a main flash, that may help with trouble shooting. I'm not sure I understand how you would need soldering to use the old TTL converter. The fact that the strobes work with the old trigger tells you something is not right with the new trigger. I see a few possibilities, with the m43 you don't tend to need as powerful a strobe as in wide angle shooting at f8 is generally sufficient. You could buy new strobes ( huge selections these days,) pick ones that work well with the UWT trigger and OM-1 You could switch to fibre optic triggering with new strobes that will use that, plenty of strobes now work with R1C! olympus triggering, though ask here first there have been posts with some strobes proving troublesome. There have abeen a few posts on this recently. You could trigger with the UWT trigger of you you could try using the mini flash for the OM-1 - that will work better in manual triggering than TTL possibly. You could explore different cables as suggested by Pavel?

Fixed it - I copied and pasted the text, copy using ctrl-C then pasted using Ctrl-Shift-V. Did you paste the text in from somewhere? If so try pasting with ctrl-shift-V.

This entire album on my webpage was taken using the OM-1 and the Canon 8-15 with Metabones smart adapter and the 140mm dome: https://www.aus-natural.com/Underwater/Walindi%20Resort%20PNG/index.html If you use Firefox the add-on xiFR, an exif reader will show you the settings including the focal length just by right clicking on or near the image.

Thanks Tom, the point I'm trying to make is the earlier lenses, be they from the 50's or 60's are likely not as good as the Carl Zeiss version which it seems was designed in the 1970s when computer aided design and new optical glasses were appearing. This would possibly explain the remark the Inavnoff-Rebikoff correctors were not as good as the Nikonos lenses in the books. Regarding doublet lenses perhaps yes if they are cemented doublets - they could have been air spaced doublets perhaps? Air spaced doublets provide an extra degree of freedom in the design due to the air space. If the front element were strong enough to resist flexing due to static pressure, as long as the join was inside the housing it would work as well as any cemented doublet I think? I understand cemented doublets become problematic in larger sizes and they were used as the polish and coatings required on the cemented surfaces were not as demanding as the cement filled defects and also avoided reflection from the two cemented surfaces.

Are you asking about an image taken with it? There would be no reason to use the speedbooster with the 8-15 as you lose zoom range and you would need to zoom in to about 11mm or so on the lens to get a full diagonal fisheye equivalent to an 8mm fisheye. Between 8 and 11 mm you would have a partly cropped circular fisheye image which is really not usable. The smart adapter gives you a full frame fisheeye through to about the same filed as a full frame 28mm rectilinear lens, so a m43 system gives you the 8mm fisheye and the 7-14 reach in one lens. The speed booster is useful though to mate with the tokina 10-17 it will produce frame filling images from about 11 to 17mm. Without the speed booster (using the smart adapter with no glass) it would not give you a full fisheye field at miniumum zoom , the view would be noticably narrower.

Metabones currently offer a type 2 adapter which will fit the OM-1 this is the m43 to Canon EF lens adapter. The Nauticam N85-N120 adapter for Nauticam ports was designed to use any Canon EF lens with any m43 camera, but they chose to design the adapter for the speedbooster, which was not needed for the 8-15 and adapting other EF lenses to m43 was probably not required as the m43 manufacturers have a very complete range of lenses. There's no shortage of second hand 8-15s though and they are not that hard to find for sale. I think it's more likely that Nauticam decided that WWL/WACP etc were the future for them so trimmed the range of offered ports and adapters. It's a pity as the 8-15 on m43 is an excellent option.

I suspect there are many versions of this lens floating around and design capability for optics has expanded quite significantly since these were originally developed. The statement above quite likely refers to what was available in the 1960s. By the 1970s the possibility of computer aided lens design appeared and was likely used with the Carl Zeiss lens Alex has and likely they were able to improve it significantly with additional elements or other changes like newly available optical glasses. So the newer Inanoff-Rebihoff correctors are likely to better optivally than the simpler ones designed in the 1960s.