Chris Ross

The right tools will always help. But prevention is even better. Looking at you housing in the photos it seems to me there's deposits on there, in the video you posted and with the surface between the ports/adapters. I would suggest a good long soak after any diving session. Also recommend applying some grease to your screws holding on the lock mechanism. Should make them easier to remove. Does the mechanism rotate freely now? It should rotate quite easily- if it is stiff perhaps it needs service, there will an o-ring on the shaft of the control that unlocks the port and the shafted should be lubricated.

AI hallucination - it conflates things all the time. Yes definitely plankton, I get small straight very tight spirals floating around in photos on my local sites.

If I'm reading correctly it's N100 extension, adapter, N120 extension, port. Problem is with N100-N120 adapter. So can you remove port from port from 30mm N120 extension? This should be possible. If you can do this remove the port. Then use lens release button to remove lens then remove body, then remove combined N100 extension and N100-N120 adapter. You might be able to move the locking mechanism from inside then.

So the lens is too big to fit through the N100 port is what you are saying? Is it a port or extension on front? Assuming it must be a port which you can't take off to access the lens. If it's an extension of course you can remove the port from the extension then release the lens and extract body then take off the adapter/extension. I thought an extension went with the 8-15 setup? If the hex in the allen head is still sound, you could try some penetrating oil dripped from above and leave it to do its work for 24 hours and try again? It seems to me it should be the safety lock release as inside it just turns a cam to raise up a blocking piece that prevents rotation and removing that cover should allow you access to allow that tab to turn.

What lens were you using? I've used the Oly 12-40, Panasonic 8mm and even their 7-14 AN found it snapped to focus quite quickly. I now have an adapted Canon 8-15 - it's not always fast but that's to be expected with an adapted lens but a small shift on focus distance is almost instant most of the time on that - the flexibility is astounding though.

The 6000 lumen video light is specced to be 110 deg wide, compared to the strobe coverage 160 deg with wide angle diffuser , the coverage without diffuser is not stated, I would guess it's maybe 130 deg based on my strobe?? The pilot light beam is narrower and I think designed for the snoot aiming. The short version is that if you are setup with standard strobe positions to minimise backscatter the pilot lights won't be pointinng at your subject. My approach to a focus light and assuming mostly strobe illumination is a torch with a 60 deg beam and about 400-700 lumens in the cold shoe of the housing. It's relatively dim so less likely to cause the fish to leave but easily enough for AF to grab focus within 1m or so from and also being so dim it doesn't show up in the images.

Yes, you can certainly be a gear head and it's fun to toss around various options and you can be just as much a gear head with m43 as FF. Interestingly all the moderator crew now shoot or have bought into m43 with 3 x OM-1s and a GH5 in use. Having said all that Davide's post to me is a reminder not to succumb to paralysis through analysis and have constant FOMO about not getting the very latest and greatest. The sensors these days are so good there really is no bad choice and it comes down to other things like lenses that are available, battery life, native sync speed etc, things you can tick off, rather than subjectively staring at test images and noise plots and confusing your self. Make a decision and starting using your new tools!

Isotta housings get away from the N85 port restrctions, they use a 102mm dia port for m43.

It's not so much the software, it's physics. By the time the part that is further away comes into focus, the closer part is badly out of focus and partly obstructing being able to see the further part. They provide two main stack methods (3 in total) One is better at avoiding the blurs of foreground objects the other better at avoiding haloes around the perimeter of the object. You can use one method to re-touch the stack made by the other method. But it has limitations and if subject parts are too far apart (in distance to the camera) it eventually becomes too hard to re-touch. Then there's the garbage in garbage out problem, setting up the stack can be challenging and it's easy to mistake which object you want to place in focus for the starting point of the stack. and it can be hard to detect if you captured everything in fine focus just looking at the small screen, particularly if your vision in not 20/20.

Yes, Helicon, it does a good job but has its limitations. First it's only as good as the frames you feed, second you need to work out how to re-touch , any crossing parts of the subjects at different distances will generate haloes, sometimes fixable in Helicon, sometimes requires cloning in photoshop.

don't say I didn't warn you. I have enough issues on land. What sort of tripod do you propose to use? The stacking software is good, but it has a steep poorly documented learning curve.

Don't believe so, this is hotshoe, there are 21 tiny contacts across the shoe, google probelms with Sony hotshoe and you'll get lots of hits.

First your housing floating, I always find positive housings to be annoying to use . You can get adjustable float arms from Kraken that allow you to get the housing perfectly neutral so it stays where you let go of it. Might be worth thinking about. Regarding cropping - do you crop as you can't get close enough or do you run out of magnification? The G5X covers 21x18mm field at max magnification and 67mm working distance with the CMC-2 The OM-1 covers 17 x 13mm at 1:1 with about 80mm working distance The Sont A7C covers 26 x 17mm at 1.4x and 90mm working distance So the Olympus 60mm gets more magnification on the sensor covering a smaller area at the same working distance as the Sony A7CR with the new 100mm macro. AF and finding subjects is easier with a proper macro lens compared to a zoom with a diopter. On the issue of latest models, yes there is a bit of FOMO, but from an image quality perspective, the improvements are incremental these days, comparing sensors from 15 plus years ago there are big advances but in the last 10 years improvements have come in readout speeds, computational photography and other aspects, rather than image quality measures. Improvements in noise and dynamic range are very much incremental, they are not non-existent but IMO not enough to choose one system over the other. By the sounds of your requirements, a macro is really what you need, many domes options allow you to get close and up 0.3x magnification, but the dome gets in the way for example trying to shoot a fish sitting on the bottom you have to shoot from above. If you are interested to look my website has a lot of UW images and there are quite a few fish of various types, you could look at this folder, all images are OM-1 with 60mm macro and select images with the MFO3. Australian Natural Images

It’s going to depend on how close you can get to your 1cm goby. A 100mm macro lens will do it, however it will only take up 1/3 of a full frame sensor horizontally. Then the 0.8m fish will have a lot if water between you and the subject, challenging strobe power and increasing chance of backscatter and reducing resolution. The MFO-3 will help , but has a limitation that its max focus distance is about 1.5m away. Different lenses will have different fields at this distance. I shoot with the OM-1 and 60mm macro, a fish about 700mm long fills the frame at max focus for the 60mm macro/MFO3 combination. I posted a thread on using this combo a while ago now: The trumpetfish in the photo from this post is about 500-600mm long and the frame is slightly cropped, so it looks like it will scrape in for your 0.8m fish requirement. The Olympus is certainly a smaller lighter option in Nauticam compared to full frame housings. It has 1/250 sync speed and can get 1/400 using the Nauticam manual trigger. You asked about gobies, this is a whip coral goby from Lembeh, OM-1 with 60mm macro, it's probably about 70% of the frame so some cropping, certainly could have gotten closer to this one. Certainly it's a decent option, some cropping is possible if photo is sharply focused to start with It will be lighter than most full frame options, though the Sony A7C will be a smaller housing I think - by a little bit. I get in and out over the rocks with some swell most of the time at my local dive site in Sydney and it's relatively easy to handle.

I think these days modern sensors are so good as long as you don't badly clip your image it doesn't matter , many sensors are ISO invariant and tweaking up exposure is no different to raising ISO in camera. Where it does help is in judging you haven't had too much flash as increasing exposure in post brings up flash as well and you wouldn't see it necessarily when reviewing the image when UW. But again if you have a histogram like shown above in my post you are not blocking shadows or blowing highlights and in fact you are only using 60-70% of the available dynamic range, so a high dynamic range camera does nothing for you. Stretching this histogram out with a levels adjustments maps the brightest pixel to just below clipping and dimmest pixel to just above blocking up and the contrast comes up and image is 90% of the way to being the finished product. So underwater all you do is expose to approximately centre the histogram and don't overdo the flash. What is happening is the strobe is not really brightening up your subject but adds enough reds that you can successfully pull the colours up and get a decent white balance. So in effect it's an ambient light shot with some warm colours added into the mix which enables you to achieve a satisfactory white balance when you adjust everything. Forget about balancing WB on the water vs the subject, you are not going to achieve deep tropical blues, but it will look OK. The other thing is that you'll only light up a 4m wide section of wreck or so at most with your strobes on the best of days so you are effectively shooting ambient light and colouring up some foreground objects with the strobes.