Chris Ross

Rodney Fox in the Neptune islands South Australia is very popular, they have an option with a cage on the bottom for photography. I've not done it, however I know many people who have and they rave about the experience. Should be easy to find some online reviews.

Some more images: This cave was on the Nusa Blowholes site on the Pacific ocean side: This is the wreck of the Catalina flying boat near Kavieng Harbour. It was taking off when it hit a swell causing an dunderwing bomb to explode, sinking it instantly. This is Halimeda Ghost pipefish, quite a few around on the Nusa Blowholes divesite. It's only about 70-80mm long, shot taken with the 8-15 fisheye at 15mm, in very close. Some mangrove shots, water is only 1-2m deep. Nemo in the mangroves: I identified around 15 fish species in this shot and there's at least 5 more I can see are different but the view wasn't good enough to ID.

Recently returned from a week on Lissenung Island resort, located near Kavieng (New Ireland Province) in Papua New Guinea. Relatively easy to get to from the East Coast of Australia, you can leave early morning and be diving the following morning, assuming the Air Niugini flight leaves on time. The issue is they need to land in daylight on the last flight of the day and if the plane is delayed, you have to overnight in Port Moresby and they fly you over very early the following morning. The resort itself is a small island about 250m by 150m or so with 8 bungalows and they dive around the semi enclosed waters among islands sitting between the Pacific ocean and the Bismark Sea. the features are some WWII aircraft wrecks, some in surprisingly good condition and diving in the inlets between the islands where currents can be strong and where pelagics and harks can be found. I also dived the mangroves there - more like snorkelling on Scuba for some interesting shooting opportunities, making use of Snell's window to include the above water parts of the mangroves in the shots. They have day boats that take you out from the resort each morning. Getting there is interesting as they pick you up from the airport and transport you to a banana boat (local open boat) and convey you out to the island, about 20 minutes. You are travelling after sunset or before if you are catching the 6:00am flight back. Navigation aids is a guy standing up front with a torch. On the return trip leaving at 4:00am for the 6:00am flight, it's a straight run towards town and without the light your eye adapt and you can see the water surface quite well ahead of the boat. First up the resort was nice, basic but comfortable bungalows, all meals provided. The food was excellent featuring locally caught seafood - other ingredients can be hard to come by as it is quite remote. In PNG the reefs are owned by local villages and fees are paid to dive on them and apparently works quite well. However the headman who was being paid for one area died and two people are claiming rights to the area and as a result the drift dive in Albatross passage was unavailable. An unavoidable part of running a dive resort in this area. Dive boats were reasonably comfortable, though were having issues with their outboards - being remote they need to organise their own service, having said that we got out on our dives every day. I was there in early October, usually the best diving though the strong El Nino had other ideas generating strong SE trade winds, quite strong before I arrived but had calmed down a bit while I was there. The other side effect is the water was a couple of degrees cooler at 27-28°C rather than the expected 29-30°C. This was fine for me, I still dived in dive-skins but the water was refreshing when you jumped in. Surface temperatures reached 30-31°C most days but the humidity was pretty high so rather sticky weather and the cooling dip was welcome. While I was there I dived quite a few walls, plus the WWII floatplane, Deep Pete, a Mitsubishi biplane, the WWII Catalina wreck and a deliberately sunk long line fishing vessel the Der Yang. as well as some more macro focused sites On all the dives, ours was the only dive boat. Visibility ranged from 15-40m with better vis on sites lining the Bismark Sea. Fish were plentiful on the reef which seemed to be in quite good shape and on the current dives pelagics made their appearance. The Adapted Canon 8-15 stayed on my OM-1 for the entire trip. Overall I enjoyed the diving and resort and I hope to get back there. Here's some images from the trip: Deep Pete WWII biplane-float plane, the bottom here is about 40m: Big school of snapper in front of the wing: Overall view of wreck taken on the ascent: Part of the Reef at Frank's reef on the Bismark sea, consisting of a series of pinnacles dropping down to the sand at around 40m depth. Fish swarming above a staghorn coral, Frank's reef Large sea fan on the wall at the Matrix dive site, this part a wall beside the channel leading in from the Bismark sea

It is interesting that Nauticam applies the " * " to the 230mm dome for this fisheye lens while all of the other fisheye zooms have the 140 mm dome asterisked. The new type II dome is asterisked for the Canon 8-15 with Kenko 1.4x while the type I dome is preferred for the 8-15 alone, while the new dome is preferred for the Nikon 8-15 with and without the 1.4x. It was previously suggested that the 140mm was preferred due to it being closer to a full hemisphere than the 230mm. Not so for the Sony lens at least and kind of shows that fisheyes may be less sensitive to precise dome positioning as the 230mm not being a full hemisphere requires the lens to be placed further forward in the dome. It is said Nauticam bases the asterisk on testing, so leaves us wondering what is better about the 230mm dome images. I would have thought you would still base dome choice on whether splits of CFWA was your priority or even that you already had either a 230mm or 140mm dome.

Have you tried shooting in manual? In most cameras this only requires a connection between the centre contact and the hotshoe frame and only needs to close the circuit- it doesn't need to transmit data like the TTL connections, so should have a greater chance of working.

I would add that you are highly unlikely to get close enough to whales to be able to get any useful light on the subject and many places prohibit the use of strobes or lights with any whales. The bigger problem which is apparent if you've been in the water with someone shooting video is that the lights are very bright and cause many subjects to turn tail and leave.

See this link from a post made by Reefphoto, there are issues you should check out when a flood occurs. Also I recall reading that the INON cases were strong but not incredibly chemical resistant so can crack when exposed to the alkaline soup from a battery flood. Here's the link: Reefphoto post I'm not aware of any INON service agents in Australia though, but this company says they can work on UW strobes: https://www.underwaterhousingservicing.com.au/about_us.htm

I don't doubt it will be an improvement over a 16-35 - it's just not a fisheye. Los of people are happily shooting with them.

There is not much around on how to do this. I found a couple of posts discussing doing this for flat ports. the principle I believe is the same for dome ports. The hard part is getting to old o-ring out. https://waterpixels.net/wp-archive/topic/68709-domeflat-port-deconstruction/#wp-post-447495 These may help a little. You could also ask the vendor is they can provide advice, or if they could do the replacement for you, I think I would be a bit nervous replacing the acrylic as it would be easier to scratch even with soft tools.

Well yes for that particular use, but if you are framing big animals it's a different story, you aren't getting close to fisheye wide, it's still better no doubt, but the advantage over rectilinears in a dome is more than just the width of the frame, the barrel distortion gives a bit of fisheye effect and you don't need to stop down so much to have decent corners, plus a big benefit is it focuses down to the glass, while retaining a good percentage of the reach of the 16-35.

The thing to remember with water contact optics like WACP is that they are not hugely wider than a 16-35 , the WACP 130 deg diagonal suggests it’s like a 10mm rectilinear, however the horizontal width of the frame is around that of a 13-14mm rectilinear lens. The water contact lenses and fisheyes both feature barrel distortion which is much stronger in the fisheye. What this means is that image scale varies across the frame, with objects in the centre rendered larger and more prominent with edges of frame rendering smaller and apparently receding. This draws attention to the subject if it’s placed in the central region. Rectilinear lenses feature constant image scale, but nearby objects appear more prominent (larger) and this becomes more apparent the wider the lens. This can cause weird distortion to a diver for example reaching forward that appears to have giant hands as they are closer to camera. Not super apparent at 16mm, more so at 14mm and on to 10mm where it is very apparent.

When do you go , is it soon? I think the winds shift within a month or so. There is a possibility of diving the far side of Lembeh island, depending on which dive resort you are with when winds swing to the north. Some nice wide angle reefs there apparently. As for lens choice I agree that a macro lens plus the MFO3 is indispensable in Lembeh, there are enough larger subjects to make good use of the MFO3. If you using the Olympus 60mm that for me was enough for most subjects I was shown.