Chris Ross

I find that videos are less than ideal for ID purposes unless it's something obvious as the fish just wriggles around making it hard to compare to reference pics. Having said that to me it looks like a dragonet of some type, possibly this, but could well be way off: https://www.fishbase.se/summary/Callionymus-bairdi.html

Hi @SwiftFF5, The system is actually supposed to block video uploads now. The concern is cost of storage when many videos get uploaded. The best solution will be to upload externally, probably to Youtube and link it to the post. Don't know why it's not showing the video, but seeing as how it's not working I deleted the video from the post. Let me know if you need assistance linking the video externally.

Fishbase can be useful, I searched for Haemulidae (grunts) and narrowed to Indonesia and started looking at pics, you find the link to show species images and then click on the species and click on the pictures link above the the photo on the species Page. I found this, it's white rather than silver however the patterns seem to match: https://www.fishbase.se/photos/PicturesSummary.php?resultPage=3&ID=4465&what=species

if you just want to buy new o-rings rather than go to a store or try to measure yours, I think you will find that all S&S ports that fit your S&S housing will take the same o-ring. there is no reason they would change between different ports. as they all need to fit into and seal against any housing that takes that port type.

Unfortunately even if you didn't turn it on, when you tell the repair centre it's water damage they will often refuse to repair. The problem is that they could replace failed components only to have corrosion take out others a few weeks after they return the camera. If salt water touches electronics it's generally toast. As for the housing internals you could try to re-use them but they will likely suffer the same fate.

This is not the reason people wish to use warmer strobes. The reasoning is that a warm strobe when white balanced back to daylight colour balance will render the water bluer. The water is not illuminated by the strobe so it has no impact on the water directly. You can't get this effect by just white balancing cooler as the subject will then be too blue. It's the same problem you get for example shooting flash of for example a sunset with with a flash lit foreground subject. The WB will only be "right" for one subject as you are mixing 5000K flash light with 2000K sunset light. The WB can only be "right"for one - not both. Not sure if all cameras do this but as I understand it at least some set the WB to standard colour temperature for flash assuming it will match and produce pleasing skin tones. So Auto WB when shooting flash defaults to 5000K or whtever the manufacturer uses. Tend to agree on LR, I don't use it but as I understand it you can set it up to use your WB and other settings as a preset to give you a starting point.

I use INON Z-240s and have generally used the 4600K diffusers that came with the units in tropical blue waters and I've been happy with the results. I have not done extensive comparisons using different diffusers though. Agree it's about colour temperature balance, not tint. If you are using INON strobes, diffusers I think are a given whether they are the standard ones or the warming diffusers. For myself I would rather get it right in camera, there are various ways of addressing the blues without impacting upon the main subject including masks, but If I can get away without drawing masks on my images I will, depending on subject they can be fiddly and you always risk edge effects around your subject.

Perhaps, but reducing pixel size to get more MP has it's limitations. Diffraction is already an issue, cropability has some benefits, however you need to be doing everything right to get those benefits high enough shutter speed and stable camera to prevent motion blur. the lens has to be up to that task etc. With macro m43 has quite a strong following, I do a lot of land based macro and focus stacking and it's astounding how good the images coming out of OM cameras are. And for UW use the little Olympus 60mm macro can fill the frame with a subject that needs a closeup diopter yielding 2x magnification on a full frame camera and is far easier to focus with a macro lens compared to using a diopter. The sensor test websites are interesting but obviously not the full picture. Prior to getting Olympus gear for UW use I had Canon gear, a 1D4, 500mm f4 lens, macro etc. I'm switching over to mostly using Olympus for land work and have the 300mm f4, 90mm macro, 12-40mm etc. It's easier to use and way lighter and overall is good enough for my needs. The only place it is put to the test a little is astro work, but fast lenses that are sharp wide open do help. I'm actually quite happy with the size of the OM-1, any smaller and it would be hard to hold for my hands, I have a EM-5 mkII which is very compact but it doesn't get a whole lot of use.

It's not OM system that will be developing the sensors as I understand things. There's only a handful of places that actually make sensors. The current OM-1 sensor is a Sony sensor while Nikon also uses Sony sensors, while Canon make their own. The camera manufacturers then work out the best way to utilise the sensor technology to build their camera around it. I really think sensor technology has plateaued if you want an example go to DXO mark and look at camera sets like for example Z8/D850/D810 covering about 10 years or Sony A7RV/A7RIII/A7RII. The Signal to noise curves all sit on top of each other dynamic range is all similar in fact Z8 is about one stop less than D850. It's not the full story of course but improvements are now very much incremental. What has been advancing is things like readout speed, on chip AF and computational photography, all nice features but not all useful for UW work. You are still not going to beat the size and weight of lenses for m43 cameras, not to mention the large range of lenses suitable for UW work.

Hi Roman, I ran it through Capture One Pro which did a decent job I thought. Just a slight reduction in tone then set levels channel by channel to get the colours right, I pulled highlights all the way down and reduced exposure to stop the highlights clipping followed by dragging the shadows up some. Next was then import into Photoshop and adjust contrast with luminosity masks - doing an "S" curve on Shadow/Highlight/midtones separately and just cropped out the remains of the sunball. It is hovering on the edge of posterising right now particularly in the JPEG and if I were really fine tuning I'd go back and back off the shadows boost a little. I also did noise reduction on the red channel and backed the reds away in levels on the mids adjustment as it was giving red snow noise in the shadows. Here it is: Manta image and here is the red channel: Red Channel I posted them as links as I have a bug on my account which screws up colours in images I insert into posts. My normal workaround is to upload to my gallery but obviously couldn't do that with a guest image!

Could be related to the number of species present that are hard to ID potentially unless you have a specimen and/or specialist knowledge? The Caribbean has 60-70 coral species while the indo pacific has 10 times that number. Sponges are also difficult to ID by all accounts. This website seems to have a lot of info about Corals in the Indo-pacific. Reef Builders

A firmware update is not going to destroy the transmitter, (which implies some sort of damage) I don't believe anyone said that. However people are reporting that they can no longer connect through the transmitter which means the capability is gone. The immediate impact is the same either way but presumably fixable in firmware or some sort of workaround Sony forgot to tell us about. 😬 It seems prudent for now to watch and wait for it to be fixed in an update. It's all too common these days for any type of tech to use early adopting customers as their Beta testers. If you can't connect seems like it's better to wait till the issue is properly sorted.

This has been going on for some time now and tropicals are regularly seen in dives off Sydney, though most don't survive the winters. I've seen quite a few myself at various times. Recently we've seen a few tropical nudis such as Tambja morosa happily dining on local bryozoans. There is actually a website that collects sightings of tropicals for research and they ask for particular species of interest south of landmark. It's called redmap: Redmap Australia - Redmap Here's a Tambja morosa from Botany Bay in Sydney, previous to this I saw it in Lembeh strait. They are found in the indo Pacific and down onto Great Barrier Reef.

Perhaps, though I don't quite follow you, in a couple of days I can post some images which may help explain better.

Roman, it has nothing to do with who started it, if someone else insults you it doesn't mean you get to insult them back. It gets a bit tiring when people seem to not get how to be civil to each other. Again play nice please - both parties!