Chris Ross

I stumbled across an Instagram post from Tobias Freidreich talking about housing maintenance and he mentioned using a Wolfbox mini blower, which is usually used to clean out PCs, keyboards etc. This is the blower: Wolfbox AUElectric Air Duster –110000RPM Super Power | WOLFBOX MF50WOLFBOX MF50 Electric Air Duster with 110000RPM super power. Perfect for electronics, keyboards, cars, and outdoor cleaning. Order now and make cleaning simple! It is a Li ion rechargeable model and does put out a lot of air. I tried it out for the first time today blowing my Nauticam housing dry after a long soak. It develops good velocity using the smallest nozzle and really moves the water droplets quite quickly. In a couple of minutes I had blown the housing completely dry, I hovered it vertically over each button and along each seam and used it to clear out water from behind the latch and all the crevices and around the vacuum valve cover. I also tried it out blowing out the 0-ring grooves. I found it performed pretty well , you need to go over the housing a few times as each new bit of water you blow out of crevices needs to be blown off the housing surface. All in all it is a big improvement of the rocket hand bulb I've been using and it's nice and portable for travel. A full blow down uses a good percentage of the available charge though. It actually seems more efficient than using a scuba tank with a duster attachment to blow off water. I think it's a worthwhile addition and would recommend it. This process of blowing off all the water droplets is important to help prevent the white coating that tends to appear on anodized housings over time. If water droplets are allowed to dry the salts in the water concentrate and start to etch the coating. It also seems efficient in blowing out residual water behind buttons and various controls. Here's a pic of it with my housing: Uploading Attachment... It should help keep you housing looking good and have a longer life. Usual disclaimer, no relationship to vendor, just happy customer. Searching for Wolfbox air duster will bring up lots of vendors. They do have a bigger more expensive model, but this one seems quite adequate for the job. Uploading Attachment...

Further to this topic I recently purchased a mini blower to blow the housing dry, seems to work pretty well. I'm posting a mini review.

Yes that's the one, to bad it can't be used then, may work on other brands perhaps?

My MFO3 came with an M67 adapter, seems to be a different one to the one you linked in your post, the glass sits back behind the end of the adapter when it is installed, so should attach to most any M67 accessory.

I'm using the MFO3, took it to Lembeh last year and got quite a bit of use out of it. Also using it in Sydney diving. On the same dive I could swap between shooting a gyrating Harlequin sweetlips with 60 and a 500mm long trumpet fish adding on the MFO3. The reason for using it is you have the 60mm capability when you need and can switch pretty quickly to the 36-37mm focal length of the MFO3, you don't get that reach with the 14-42 and macro is more of a challenge. It seems to me there are advantages to be able to shoot the smallest fish with the 60mm over the 14-42. Focusing seems very straight forward with the MFO3, I didn't notice any hunting when using it and if you look at the EXIF you are shooting between 2m and infinity on the lens as reported in the EXIF for the most part (the subject is of course much closer) . This is the range where the 60mm is quite snappy. I would add that the 14-42 once you get to the long end is reported to be not the sharpest knife in he drawer while the MFO3 is sharp across the frame as it corrects for the aberrations caused by shooting through a flat port. At the 36-37mm focal length the 14-42 would be experiencing those aberrations behind a flat port. Here's a brief review of using the MFO3 with the 60mm macro:

If you look at the colour spaces Macs use DCI-P3 which is a little smaller than Adobe RGB and is extended in reds/yellows more so than blues/green that Adobe RGB covers better. This diagram shows the coverage of various colour spaces:

I agree in principle, One thing that seems apparent there are quite a few flavours of TTL among different strobes, you just have to look at the UWT triggers which have multiple different settings for all the different strobes and a different trigger model for each camera brand. I believe the timings are different with each type of TTL and I suspect this is a reason TTL is regarded as unreliable underwater as up until recently a universal slave TTL was all that was available. I heard somewhere that Olympus RC is open source so it does not need reverse engineering to make it work so in principle UW strobes that work with RC mode will work as well as any Olympus strobe on land when shooting TTL. It was also specifically setup to send TTL commands optically. This is probably the reason it might work a little better.

No problem, they are nice to work with - right! One thing to remember, if you are posting these, browser are mostly default colour managed now, however they will assume your image is sRGB unless it is tagged otherwise, You do need to keep the colour profile in the file, there is generally a check box to include the colour profile in the file when you save. Unfortunately you need the good monitor to see the benefit, Apple users will be close, but if they are being viewed by photography enthusiasts they are more likely to have a good monitor.

You can get very close with it, it compresses the range that will focus quite a bit, I haven't tested the limits of it at the short end, but the port chart says it will focus from 0-1500mm and get to 0.8x implying it will focus from the glass out to 1.5m away. If I need to get super close, it seems the best solution is often to remove the MFO3 and use the bare lens as you will get more magnification and working distance. The exception would be murky water with particles and you want to get closer to reduce backscatter.

Guide numbers can be quite misleading, A lot depends on how the light is distributed in the beam. Quite a few strobe tests have been posted on here in the last couple of years, it's probably about the best comparison you could find. Assume you've looked at the pinned strobe comparison table in this forum, the spreadsheet linked has larger images.

There have been some threads discussing this, I recall there is a quality uplift, but don't recall how dramatic.

sorry no, best to DM I think, you could try looking through his posts you might see something there?

I would expect that the TTL of the maxi would use the same protocols as other recent Retra strobes. I found this reference to TTL performance of a 4th generation Retra here:

In principle the way to do this is fairly easy, you just need to work out the right extension. I see the Seacam port chart mentions that is using a converted lens with Metabones to use to the PVL25 extension and that the zoom ring is a special. To that you would need to add extension equivalent to the thickness of the converter in question. Presumably you use the recommended Canon extension with the PVL 25, but you would need to confirm that with Seacam and also ask them if they can help you with a zoom ring, otherwise you would need to have one printed. I would also add that the compact dome or one of the fisheye ports would be more flexible for this setup if you want to do CFWA as you can get quite a bit closer.

Thanks for this, though possibly better 18650 batteries may now be available? I suspect you method has some validity, if the strobe has more power in your test it probably is also brighter in comparison for a quick burst, but I guess it depends on how the strobe is programmed to deal with continuous shots. In addition using 3 18650 (assuming) in series, the voltage is higher so less demanding on amp draw.