Chris Ross

They are basically only used for stills to keep shutter speed within range of flash sync speed if you shoot macro lenses fairly wide open for shallow depth of field. something like a 4 stop filter would allow you to shoot a lens at f2.8 where you ordinarily use f11 and be happy with the Background brightness. For much of Lembeh unless you are in shallows and also wanting to shoot wide open ambient light is not that strong.

Looks like you've swapped a HF-1 filter diffuser with Retra diffuser and put them on different strobes.

As far as I can tell my Olympus flash unit in combination with the OM-1 does auto super FP, I normally have that turned on in flash menu and the flash knows what speed is set on the camera. it seems that this might be incorporated into either the flash or the trigger? When I get back home I'll see if I can test this out.

As you are in Australia you'll know prices can be high. If you are sticking with wide angle work you could consider the INON S220, a surprisingly capable little strobe with good coverage and quite even light. They are quite reliable. If you want more power there's been quite a few released recently. I've seen good reports on the new circular tube AOI strobe on the forum recently. Like you I shoot in sometimes murky temperate waters (I'm in Sydney) and I recently upgraded to Retra strobes, I got the pure model before it was discontinued. What I found was the combination of that strobe with the reduction rings was night and day to my old Z-240s in terms of backscatter reduction. All using the same strobe positions. Not in every shot, but I had way less particles being lit up. I'd suggest getting strobe that allow you to add reduction rings. Regarding full frame I am convinced it's not needed UW if you are not doing it professionally . Sure if you can afford it and can handle slepping the bigger rigs around go for it, but it's really not needed IMO. I shoot m43 and I remain happy with that - lenses, ports housings are all smaller and lighter and as you don't need to stop down so much (f8 is fine) lower powered strobes will do the job.

Yes that is correct. The advantage of the 2x is you can you all the way from 8-15 with more reach and with the Sony 2x image quality is reported to be as good by several people.

Agree, you can see what happens when you convert to sRGB, The water colour goes off completely. I used to convert to sRGB for web display, but these days I leave it in Adobe RGB.

All I'm trying to say is two people have done reviews and found the HF-1/maxi performing a little better in the high FPS performance and you have tested and found your Apollo III better. There is the possibility based on this that your samples of HF-1 or their batteries aren't up to speed, just like you suggested that the Apollo III strobe samples one of the testers has were not up to scratch. To be fair high FPS is not important to everyone I used to use high FPS on land a little and ended up getting sick of examining hundreds of near identical images to pick the image I thought best. But each to their own if you see an advantage to this in your shooting, more power to you. If it's important to you, make your choice of brands that can perform like this using testing like we have seen on this post to guide you.

appears it is a standard gamut monitor covering sRGB only. I find the extended blues and greens in Adobe RGB particularly useful for UW work. The Eizo panels cover all of Adobe RGB colour space.

Both lenses? I know at least the Nikonos lenses don't reach focus in air. I would assume the S&S lens would be similar.

I would suggest examining the port chart to see what you can re-use or minimise buying new ports. If you have or want to use a macro lens in future consider if you can use the same port with an extension tube. I believe the collapsing pancake lenses, at least some models aren't that reliable. For example the Panasonic 14-42 (not the- PZ) takes the 35 port, you can add a 30mm extension to use the 60mm macro. There will be other combinations.

I would observe that we have two independent people stating the HF-1 out performs the Apollo III strobe and one person reporting that the Apollo III is better compared to their HF-1. Surely it's equally possible that the HF-1s in question(or their batteries) are under performing compared to the Apollo III samples as the only data available is the comparative performance of the strobe samples that are owned. It could also be related to the batteries being used in each model as these seem to critical to achieving this sort of performance. Backscatter in particular are quite vocal about using the right type of battery and it's not unheard of for batteries to lose performance after some use.

The field can be estimated same way as any lens and 8-15 with 1.4x becomes a 11-21mm lens. You still get the full 180deg diagonal at 15mm actual focal length, this means 11-14.9mm (actual focal length vignettes with the corners dark, similar to what you see between 8 and 15mm on the bare lens. I've done the calculations assuming an equisolid fisheye projection and with the 1.4x at 15mm FL (11.2mm on the zoom ring) the horizontal field is 144 deg, while zoomed all the way in to 21mm the field is 96 deg wide which is about equivalent to 16mm rectilinear lens. Comparing horizontal fields gives a better idea of coverage in my view.

There are lots of monitor choices around these days, but the field for truly colour accurate monitors is much more limited. I have a pair of Eizo color edge monitors, One is a CS2731 and the other is a more basic Eizo model. I use the good panel for my image and the second screen will have the various toolbars, like actions, libraries, history etc on it. It is also used when I need another app open and visible at the same time. Realistically as far as I have been able to work out Windows only properly supports one monitor profile, though I haven't dug in more deeply recently. If I recall correctly I calibrated the secondary panel once and used a workaround to apply the calibration. One of the reasons to have a high end monitor is so that they can be calibrated well to show the full colour gamut they are capable of, so to me it makes sense to have one good quality monitor and a second for more pedestrian work that doesn't need the colour accuracy. I think you won't go wrong with Eizo panels. Though they mostly have 27" panels and some larger ones in the high end CG range but they are quite pricey. They have good warranty cover and dead pixel policy. This company is enthusiastic about colour accuracy and you read their monitor recommendations here, they recommend Eizo and for cheaper monitors BenQ range: Monitor Recommendations | Image Science

The issue with the 12-32 is you need to zoom in to 14mm to stop the vignette, a minor inconvenience I guess. I recall that the non-pancake Panasonic 14-42 was tested some time back and found to give the best performance.

Hi @Adventurer , I believe you have Apollo III 2.0 strobes based on your previous posts, the data from @DreiFish mentions Apollo III, not Apollo III 2.0 - is this referring to the same model strobes?

with or without strobes? I use AWB and it's generally pretty close when shooting with strobes. I've shot a few subjects purely with ambient and also used AWB as I recall, it wasn't perfect but provided a good starting point for adjusting the raw files.

Hopefully someone who actually does this will chime in, however, I assume you have read the manual; #11075-HSS-SONY-A1-A9II-Nauticam-November-2025.pdf - Google ไดรฟ์ It has a section on shooting in manual mode, there are 3 ways of doing it, the WL mode it seems is a workaround to deal with the fact you can't set manual mode in the SONY menus, so the converter is set to use the WL mode setting to turn manual on and off through the WL setting in the menu. This is programmed into the converter, so WL mode doesn't do what the camera manual says it will. It seems like the simplest way if you are not sure and new to manual mode and don't plan switch to TTL (it seems you are saying you are resigned to shooting manual), you follow the instructions for shooting in hard manual mode - setting so the converter is on zero as is the strobe. My understanding 0 is hard manual for any strobe and the other settings select the TTL profile and also allow HSS to work according to which strobe you have. You may miss out on HSS this way, but this is not likely to be a problem unless you want to shoot in wide apertures for macro. It's probably best to KISS if you are new to manual strobe shooting and get that sorted before venturing into HSS. You just need to not set a shutter speed greater than max sync speed when shooting if you are in hard manual.

Seems to me time is on your side to search out a second hand rig, while it might be nice to carry over lenses etc. I would suggest being open minded if the right deal of a full package comes along, If you want to stay APS_C and Canon and Nauticam it will probably limit your choices a little.

Looks great Joanna, thanks for reporting back it is indeed very flexible.

That statement is specific to 90/100mm macro lenses, for sure the 50 and 60mm macros will work better behind a dome, the wider the lens, the more the dome helps.

That is exactly why people use Cola to remove tarnish from metals, we all know what it will bring up a coin like new. Regarding Hydrofluoric acid this is quite water soluble so there is not much advantage to using baking soda so you flush with large quantities of water, you should also be careful that the foaming caused when CO2 is released when reacting with acids does not cause splashing or over flow and damage other things. Ni MH batteries on the other hand leak potassium hydroxide when wet. Again water soluble but alkaline rather than acidic. Whatever you do the final step is flushing with clean water so you don't leave any salts or other contaminants behind.

Thanks, was using the wrong search term. There are two issues possibly three to contend with, first the long protruding nose, there needs to be enough space to fit that. Second apparently there is a modified lens mount to prevent the bayonet engaging, an extra tab I f I recall corrrectly, I think I saw a post from someone who proposed removing that tab. Third is may also be locked out electronically. It's unfortunate as I think UW photographers are probably the only people who would want to do this. Also I believe there are no RF mount Kenko converters.

I didn't see that in the linked page and I searched the article, is it in the video or somewhere like that? I think UW photographers are the only people on the planet who might be interested in adding a converter? The issue is that the Canon RF 1.4x has a very long nose. On the 190deg field maybe the solution is to position the lens at the 180 deg point in the lens and the blue ring will be vignetted out? On the filter holder, this is similar to what is used on the big tele lenses. If it gets in the way of the zoom ring you might be able to remove it and put some tape over the hole. Also the position of the zoom gear in the housing will influence whether it's a problem, the Nauticam housings for example position the camera back in the housing so there is room for an RF-EF adapter, which means the gear will be forward of where the filter holder is. All of this will be confirmed or otherwise no doubt once the housing manufacturers have tried it out.

As I understand things Coca Cola is not a routine cleanup medium, I have seen people suggest using it after a Li-ion battery has been flooded and the battery compartment is full of sea water mixed with battery innards, The blend of sea water and the internal components of a Li-ion is going to be far worse than Coca Cola. The active ingredient of coke is phosphoric acid, that's why it makes tarnished coins look like new. I don't think I would put it a battery compartment unless I had a flood. You do need to consider what the strobe is made from - plastic strobes could be harmed by hydrocarbon solvents used in some contact cleaners, likewise just pouring isopropyl alcohol in is not advisable as it may react with some plastics. There was a post some years back with advice from Reef photo about what could happen to a flooded INON strobe, they said that plastic used in INONs was strong but not chemically resistant. Isopropyl should only be applied to contacts with a Q tip not poured in. IMO Coca cola would do less damage than alcohol - plastic is generally inherently resistant to acids especially relatively mild ones like phosphoric.

I think the value of something that old is just not there, even one generation old gear sells for very little. You might get lucky and get some $$ or not. I see a couple of options, Get it serviced and keep using it. Find a low actuation body as a backup. Retire it and get another system you could see what was available second hand and if you get a complete system and don't try to keep using your lenses it's probably easier to find something you like. Retire it and buy a new housing and body and try to salvage your lenses and ports. Adapting your macro lens to mirrorless may not be so great in performance though??