Chris Ross

Is this strobe lit or natural light? If it is consistent dialling in exposure comp in some manner - if you are using manual a bit higher ISO or slower shutter than what you would use based upon the whatever you use for feedback. For strobes crank it up as well. To be honest I often find shots a little under exposed (strobes for macro with manual SS/aperture) and the images take quite well to a bit of exposure boost in Raw processing if needed, it's really no different to boosting the ISO the same amount.

I agree with regular cleaning of clamshell o-rings, they need lubricating and things stick to them. You can get away with not lubricating surface o-rings. If you look at them when you open the housing you see small droplets of water clinging and that can transfer inside if you close up again. I would suggest you look at not lubricating your surface o-rings on the new housing and examine it critically each time you open it, checking for water droplets, maybe pull it to see if you are getting grit sticking to it. As for ports, I dive maybe once a week and tend to leave them in place unless I'm changing ports. I run the blower around close to the seam to blow out any water I can. I've been doing it this way for quite a few years and things remain in good shape. As for any threads screwed into m67 ports, I would suggest removing it and blowing it dry. I do that with my Nauticam bayonet adapter regularly Fine threads like that are a classic for seizing up. The need for demin water rinsing is probably debatable. I expect in hard water areas it may be worth doing, but not if the water is soft. Sydney luckily has quite soft water. For post glass keeping it wet till you can soak is my main objective.

The AOI housing has no provision for a viewfinder eyepiece, it's just a plain window to look into the camera viewfinder you can see the image but as Adrian notes you can't see all of it. So effectively the back screen is the only game in town for this housing.

If you are shooting with strobes - typical macro shooting where the exposure is 100% from the strobes and the background is dark to black, then S-OVF is a must as you can't see your subject otherwise take your pick. I tend to leave mine in S-OVF, underwater it is easy to misjudge image brightness on the screen or the viewfinder I find so if you want to judge exposure looking at a histogram is probably better.

If you look at the port charts, they list short port 22 and 25 for both the LX100_II and L10 and they can zoom to either 30 or 40mm respectively on both cameras while the standard port zooms to the full 75mm. You mention your LX100 port is fixed to your housing - presumably that is a type one LX100? - which it seems also had interchangeable ports, so presumably that short port is discontinued You say you can't get your off the LX100 housing? Have you tried a strap wrench? What are you trying to achieve, are you looking to use an M67 wet lens other than a WWL? There is the Nauticam bayonet adapter: https://www.backscatter.com/Nauticam-Bayonet-Mount-Adaptor-for-SMCCMC-Lens which says it works for SMC/CMC/MFO M67 lenses, though it may not end up with the right spacing for other wet lenses. Looking at the M67 short port it mentions there is no zoom, so it may be shorter and not allow you to zoom in or perhaps the L10 lens protrudes a little more at minimum zoom.

If your light still has some charge you should be able to use a multi meter to work out which socket on the light is positive, that then tells you which pin is positive.

A good catch indeed. There is a significant inward force on ports at depth, 1 bar pressure at 10m as we know which is 14.7 psi differential between inside and outside of the housing. A 120mm dia port is 17.5 sq inches and with 14.7 psi differential that gives 257 lb force at 10m depth.

Hi Chip, by removing the mount, you mean the tripod mount attached to the Metabones? Good information that a standard zoom gear works with this setup. Does that mesh with the adapter gear or the housing gear? Not doubting what you observed at all, but it does seems odd that your setup vignettes at 60mm plus 35.5mm adapter but Wolfgang reports he uses 60mm total extension with the 35.5mm adapter, the fact some of the extension is on the other side of the adapter should make no difference.

As I understand only the mKV works if you want to use it with the TC, the ID of the MkV adapter is bigger so the nose of the teleconverter fits through.

You would expect that with less extension you would not run into vignetting, what this does is move the centre of curvature back behind the entrance pupil of the lens, so it's no longer optimally placed. This will cause I believe a bit more barrel distortion and a slight loss of field of view. Having said all that it seems Fisheye optics are less sensitive to the exact placement of the dome compared to rectilinear lenses in my view, though there are some who will argue this point. It's good to see the performance looked good when you tested it. It seems to be a great very flexible solution. On Wolfwangs's point about zoom gears - I'm not sure I got the meaning exactly, however changing the extension tube in front of the N100-N120 adapter has no impact upon the the zoom gear fit. On the topic of zoom gears I used Wolfgang's adapter solution to get my zoom gear matching the knob in my N85-N120 adapter, but found it would lose mesh when turned unless i provided inward force on the knob. It prompted me to change over to a zoom gear that uses the housing zoom knob and I find that a lot easier to use.

So it appears that this port was designed to work with a couple of Sony cameras using a 1/2.3" sensor which is 6.2 x 4.5, so quite small. Typically UW ports are designed around a specific field of view on a particular sensor size, so it might struggle on larger sensors. Only way to find out is probably to try it.

I would agree, though I have an 8-15 fisheye on m43 and it's effectively a fisheye and the first 2/3 of the range of a WWL/WACP and it can do the job of both. In Sony you can get this with the Sony 2x with metabones and 8-15.

Decent quality cards are reasonably priced these days as long as you are not at top tier speed, though i notice they have gone up along with many computer items recently. The bonus for faster cards is they will download faster if you have the right card reader. I've been using 200GB/sec sandisk SD cards and have 2 128GB cards and back up to a laptop daily. I could write to both cards in camera but generally don't bother and just keep some backup copies. You only need the really fast cards for high frame/sec shooting of full res images, even video is not that demanding in comparison, not likely to need it UW. My raw files are about 17MB (20MP m43 camera) and I can fit over 4000 images on one card.

You are referring to the USB-C bulkhead? The Nauticam right angle plug only just fits through the special M16-M24 adapter, it has to be angled through, If you had a right angle USB plug you could see if you can squeeze it through the M16 on your housing, bearing in mind that . The Kraken bulkhead might be a safer bet as you plug the cable in from inside the housing and it doesn't need to go through the m16 hole.

Actually quoting diagonal fields of view is a bit misleading when comparing rectilinear lenses to barrel distorted wet optics as with barrel distortion the corners are stretched the most. It would be quite rare to place a subject like a whale, a shark or even a wreck along the diagonal axis, rather they are placed along the horizontal axis typically, so in my view comparing the horizontal fields gives a truer picture of the difference in subject size they can accommodate. The horizontal field of a 16mm rectilinear is 96 degrees, while a WWL at the widest is about 106 degrees in the horizontal axis, which is about a 13.5mm rectilinear lens horizontal field. so the horizontal field of view is only 10 degrees wider not 25 degrees wider. All that said I wouldn't take a bit dome down to shoot whales if i Could get similar fields from the smaller wet optics. A fisheye has a 144 degree horizontal field in comparison so is significantly wider.