Chris Ross

So I assume the trick is to have the housing in trim and close to neutral and just loosely hold to avoid transferring your movement to the housing. For trim a large acrylic dome for example will make the housing want to twist upwards and make life particularly difficult pointing anywhere other than it's natural position with the dome pointing up.

That should work pretty well as long as the lenses don't interfere too much with sight-lines

I was using it today, Vis was quite ordinary with plenty of particles, shooting a nudi about 80mm long, where I would usually think twice about attaching the MFO3, but getting in closer made a big difference in particles in the images. Focus is indeed quite snappy.

Perhaps, just have to try it out, the only concern you might have if it gets in the way of aiming, which becomes more of a problem as you increase magnification. Will that system restrict your strobe arm movement at all? I'm not sure exactly how it will work but sounds like you are connecting your two inner arms together with the 8 arm?

If you have trouble finding somewhere to mount a bayonet caddy - one solution is float arms in place of stix floats - they generally have a mounting point for a caddy I use the INON float arms, price is reasonable and i've been using them for many years. I used shorts for the MFO3 in Lembeh, it worked quite OK and I didn't attach it to tether in the pocket- but it's a big lump of glass and the elastic pocket held it tight particularly with bayonet adapter ring attached. It wasn't exactly easy to get in there, but I worked my way around it. Regarding the MFO1, I haven't heard it's a great improvement on m43, it's basically just a weak diopter. You could try leaving it on and stacking the UCL lens for more power. Stacking a CMC on an MFO1 is not recommended as both correct for the water interface, but there was some discussion you could do it with a third party diopter. You could add a flip to the MFO-1 perhaps, but it would be easy enough to try it first before buying more gear.

It is quite common to see vignetting like this in lenses for mirrorless cameras, the manufacturers will do this to produce a cheaper lens and correct the errors electronically. I found a review on line with an image both corrected and uncorrected and it appears what Canon has done is the lens uncorrected has a field of view a bit wider than 24mm and as the lens has a lot of barrel distortion which stretches the corners that they pull in to create a 24mm wide frame electronically. Doing this they avoid having to correct for the strong barrel distortion. ( of course I don't have the lens in hand and it's equally possible that the correction produces an image that's not as wide as a true 24mm lens - this would be a good project to compare the 24mm field (corrected) with that of an L lens like the 24-105) That aside a lot of reviews regard this lens as not the sharpest knife in the drawer so unfortunately FF Canon users are stuck with a wet optics lens that is less than ideal. The Nikon equivalent 24-50 is reportedly much sharper. Which brings up another point, that wet optics like the WWL can't improve a soft lens. One of the claims when the WWL first appeared was that domes degraded images enough that you could match the performance of a top line 16-35 lens in a large dome with the kit lens mated with a WWL. In some cases you could, but not all kit lenses are created equal and the RF 24-50 is a lot less equal than something like the EF 28-70 lens that can be mated with the WACP or the Sony 28-60. Having said that one or two reviews said the optics were OK - perhaps there is sample variability with these lenses or those reviews were not representative?? So the sad truth is that for Canon users who want to use wet wide optics - at least from Nauticam is that the 24-50/WWL-C combination provides flexibility but at the cost of less than stellar performance and it seems the WACP-C is a better option?

Hi Mike, welcome onboard!

However this site from Reef photo suggests it may not work for a YS-D1, see item 3) : Reef Photo & VideoTroubleshooting Strobes With Electrical SyncFew things can be more frustrating on a trip than when your usually reliable electrically triggered strobes suddenly stop working.Ikelite has a similar page for their strobes.

The Lumen ratings on cheap lights in aliexpress and similar sites are likely works of fiction. I have heard many say they all seem to come from the same factory, so not much to choose between them until you get into named brands and more $$$. The reason for warm light is that when colour balancing on the subject, the background water becomes a deeper blue, this is mainly used in strobes for still images. Strobes are way more powerful than lights and I would expect that you would struggle to get the same effect on video as the amount of artificial light is generally less than what you get with a strobe as you need to push the colour temperature further overall to get the same colour balance on the subject with less artificial light added.

Hello Julio, welcome to the forum, good to have you here. I pasted your text into Notepad, a plain text editor which strips formatting and copied and pasted back to forum - this allows the text to wrap. If you paste in text from external sources this can help to ensure it displays prperly on the forum.

I used the Pany 8mm plus Zen 100mm dome for a while before I went with the Canon 8-15, used it for most of the shots in these two galleries: https://www.aus-natural.com/Underwater/Rowley%20Shoals/index.html https://www.aus-natural.com/Underwater/Weda%20Resort%20Halmahera/index.html There are a couple of shots taken with the 12-40 in each gallery, I used it on the first day then switched to the fisheye for the rest of the images (95%+) . On Olympus bodies the Panasonic 8mm has some purple fringing in the corners, which is mostly correctable in RAW processing and it's not always noticeable. The Olympus 8mm is a little bit more expensive and uses an extension tube. Either option is very compact and convenient for travel. Here's a pic of the Zen dome with Pany 8mm and the Canon 8-15 (with Metabones) for size comparison. You can actually use the 8-15 with the Zen dome, but need the N120 version- the front element won't fit through the N85mount.

Exactly, it's a good solution for a great many people. I don't use it, but I've adapted a Canon 8-15 which is an excellent solution as well, even if it's a little expensive and heavy.

I leave the o-rings in place, but I dive locally and do single dives every few weeks as well as trips away. I think if I was only diving on trips once or twice a year I could see pulling to o-rings and storing them in zip-locks inside the housings, but If I'm diving regularly, they just stay in the housing and get checked as required. I don't see much point in putting old o-rings in place - you may get contaminants in the groove, but you need to check the groove before installing the o-ring regardless and you have to keep track of which o-ring is the old one. For travel they also stay in place, the port is detached so the housing is not sealed and a cap goes over the port/o-ring for travel and this protects it well enough.

Voltages are not that different, nominal 3.6V per cell, so 7.2V total with two cells, four 1.2V cells gives 4.8V, if using a Retra with 8 cells it's 9.6V nominal. What counts is the voltage of all of the batteries in series. The voltage in isolation doesn't give the whole story as it is the current produced which is related to circuit resistance and voltage that sets the energy being transmitted. I don't know exactly what is going on here, 20A is a high current load for a battery , but for example a normal 220-240V power point can handle 15 amps of AC current without any problem. I know DC is different, but for contacts the main issue is arcing when disconnecting. You don't get power plugs being destroyed and they are handling a lot more power and video lights with bigger contacts don't seem to have the issue.

Note that S&S strobes used to be notorious for having low sensitivity on their optical trigger and were quite sensitive to fibre optic cable quality. You can bypass this by using an infra-red remote control. Just point the remote's LED directly into the fibre optic port on the strobe and press any of the buttons. the infra red signals will trigger strobes quite easily. A remote for a TV, DVD player, aircon unit etc is fine as long as it has an LED you point at the device.