Chris Ross

A lot of people use them , they are cheap for a reason. Among other things the ports are setup for multiple lenses, but can only have the right positioning for one of them. They will let you get your camera underwater and seal properly and certainly you can take quite good shots with them. The vacuum system is not recommended as it can only be used to test, it's not water tight so you don't keep the case under vacuum while diving, which defeats part of the purpose of pre-loading the o-rings. There is a third party solution though. You could check with UW technics when the time comes if they support YS-110a. They are getting quite old now though.

What strobes do you currently own? The ikelite strobes have their won proprietary TTL system that only works with the ikelite TTL triggers which are now a little cylinder that connects to a housing bulkhead. They used to line inside the housings. I know at leats one person who has had ongoing issues with these triggers. But there is more than one way to solve the problem The new external UW technics triggers could be used on ikelite and assuming you have compatible strobes you should be able to use them . If not compatible you have a wide choice of other strobes you can use. I still think you should consider jumping to m43 generally a great system to use, with a lot more choices for housings and lenses, depending upon which body you choose. You could even use your 10-17 with the metabones speed booster.

Welcome aboard, good to have you here.

First thing to try is a new battery in your trigger. Double check the dial on the trigger is set to the right number. Definitely try it with manual position. Next see if you can trigger your strobes through the cables. Point a TV remote sensor into the cable and press any of the buttons. point the IR emitter into the fibre end. You might need to move it around. If this doesn't work point it into the sensor on the strobe. The IR remote should readily trigger most strobes.

Perhaps, but keep in mind Achtel is built around cinema where fisheyes are not favoured and the there is nary a mention of the Nikonos 13mm, though he does list the availability of some of highly specialized fisheye lenses, though it is not clear if they are water contact lenses. The issue as always is the lack of UW lens tests, air based tests can of course point you in the right direction, but not all lenses take well to being taken underwater for various reasons - one recently discovered parameter is a short minimum focus distance. I suspect there are others such as curvature of field which is readily taken care of on land by depth of field but if it bends in the wrong direction it might not play well with dome ports. I have not seen a convincing explanation of why some lenses are great on land but don't play well underwater - The Nikon 14-28 f2.8 lens is one I know of, there must be a reason for this and quite likely has something to do with not handling the curved virtual image very well. Another is they may be poorly optimized for performance at minimum focus distances.

Interesting ..... Achtel is located 5 minutes drive from where I grew up and less than an hour from home by car going by the address on the website. I don't that I would say forced to use conservative f-stops. You can only force yourself to make that choice. Me, I would rather stop down to where I need for depth of field or - say for a fisheye to get around the dome port issues than get the ultimate resolution - the overall image is most important and it's always a compromise. It seems to me that if you accept the statements from Achtel.com that domes reduce resolution to less than high definition partly due to the curved virtual image that you will be looking at fisheye lenses or water contact optics of some type for the highest resolution. Rectilinear lenses have a flat plane of focus parallel to the sensor while the virtual image is curved at some number of radii of the dome port in use. Fisheye lenses do not have a flat plane of focus, generally it is curved surface which may or may not be equivalent to a hollow sphere. Depending on the fisheye projection the focal plane may be circular or it may be flattened. But in any case it is much closer to the shape of the virtual image formed by the dome than the flat plane of best focus of a rectilinear lens. As an aside the S&S corrector lens attempts to do something like this - basically flattening the virtual image so that the host lens can digest it more readily I expect that the ability of water contact optics to operate at larger apertures is related to the fact that optic acts like a fisheye lens and it converts that image in to a flat focal plane that the rectilinear lens inside can digest. If all of this this is correct looking at land based tests of lenses probably only helps with center resolution it would seem??

Welcome to the forum Chris, good to have you here!

Yes that is indeed the difficulty. It seems to me that the suggestion of looking at Bali might e a good one if timing for the Maldives is not good, the advantage being that there is a huge range of options and flights to get there. this website seems to suggest Nusa Penida might indeed be a good option for the OP. https://www.zubludiving.com/articles/zublu-insights/manta-ray-seasons-in-indonesia

Unfortunately that's internet forums for you people run off on tangents on things that interest them. But seriously - please continue to dig and find resources and test images to make your points.

IMO, you are chasing a tiny improvement at best, there's thousands of great shots taken with the Canon 8-15 with the recommended dome dimensions. The test shots displayed on here of the banknotes certainly didn't set the world on fire. I would be interested to see some shots also - test shots are generally preferred as they are a shot of a flat surface and you don't have to work out if the softness is due to optics or if the foreground is falling out of the depth of field.

It depends on how small a subject you find and want to photograph, the MFO-1 reduces the frame covered from 36mm wide to 30mm wide providing 1.2x magnification. The SMC-3 gets 2.3x with the frame being 15.5mm across with 47mm working distance. The SMC3 focuses between 47 and 103mm and I expect it won't give you any overlap with the MFO-1 range. For me I would also factor in how often I find these things, if it's once on the entire dive trip maybe a better solution for this one critter is to crop?

While this is certainly an interesting exercise, there is a fundamental problem. You will see this notice on sites like optical limits: Please note that the MTF results are not directly comparable across the different systems! what does this mean - it means they are testing the combination of the lens, sensor, anti alias filter, de-mosaicing algorithm and any camera specific changes. But what does this actually mean? Well searching around I found a website that tested the same lenses on different camera systems. They tested a SONY 50mm f1.2 on both a Sony and Nikon camera and on SONY (A7RIII) its peak Imatest score was 3611 at f2.8 while on Nikon (z7) it was 4128 @ f2. There is also a test of a 35mm f1.4 EF lens on SONY, Canon and Nikon. The Canon camera used has an anti alias filter so returns significantly lower scores on the same lens Here is the site: https://photographylife.com/our-canon-and-sony-lens-reviews-will-have-imatest-data-comparable-to-nikon So where does this leave us? We can certainly work out the fastest knife in the drawer in any particular brand of lens if they are tested on the same camera. We know that a 3600 score will pretty much certainly sharper than say a 2500 score, but unless the top contenders are tested on the same system we will struggle to decide which is first place. We could use the plots supplied in the link above to approximately convert between the systems, however they only really apply to the cameras they use for testing. As for the Nikonos test the biggest problem I expect is the fact that the testing was done on a completely different system. The centre score in LP/mm should still be valid for a full frame sensor with the same characteristics - the corners of course are a different story. And to be truly comparable the Nikonos is tested UW, you would need to test the other lenses UW as well to compare them. Then there is the problem of different amounts of water between the lens and target. You could probaly validly compare the 8-15 with a Nikonos 13mm equivalent but perhaps not a 16-35 lens for example.

probably not a known site, but some large things will be there, it was basically one option you could get to from Singapore. The idea was to give you some options to consider with flight schedules. There are lots of direct flight into Singapore but probably not so many destinations you can fly to from there for diving. Getting into Indonesia there are not many direct flights to Jakarta except from Amsterdam, but once you are in Jakarta you can travel anywhere in Indonesia. Some flights AMS-CGK are operated by Garuda, some by KLM, Garuda is reported to be better. Minimizing connections is always a good first approach to travel. Once you are Indonesia there are multiple options to consider, same with the Phillipines etc. On the big animals question often this involves drops in the open ocean well away from snorkelling sites, quite a number of them you are snorkelling/freediving but I wonder how suitable it might be for your daughter? It seems the most likely option for big animals with snorkelling options might be a site where there are manta cleaning stations with plenty of coral/snorkelling spots in the general area. Mantas can be seasonal so you would need to check into timing to visit.

If you look at Pavel's post on his TTL converters on Sea frogs, he shows one mounted on a Sea frogs housing. The housing looked rather stained by watermarks and given they have only been out for a short while this must have occurred rapidly. Brings into question the quality of the surface treatment.

In the Nauticam system it's easy as the camera is positioned in the housing so that you can use all or you current lenses, ports, extension tubes and zoom gears on your new housing. Put it another way the when you use the EF-RF converter the RF port chart has a line item which directs you to use the EF port chart. It does this by positioning the lens flange further back in the housing by the thickness of the EF-RF adapter. That way the the zoom gear will line up with the control gear in your new housing. You would be able to do this with other systems, but would need to buy various extension rings, zoom gears and sometimes ports. For example with Isotta you can convert Nauticam ports to work on Isotta by changing the lug ring, but not extension tubes and the zoom gears won't match. WHen the time comes prepare a spreadsheet to add up all the costs to see what you are up for in total.

Isn't this the same lens that @DreiFish tested and pronounced to have pretty poor optical quality in his thread from a little while back. Consulting google there are some tests that pronounce optical quality to be quite good and others such as the digital picture tests with sample images that pronounce it to be quite poor. I agree there are some very good lenses coming out now, but you still tend to get what you paid for. The searching of reviews suggests that there is a lot of sample variation in this lens so it's a bit of a lottery it would seem about how good the lens you get is. Or perhaps the good reviews received hand picked lenses to test?? BTW the test for the the 24-50 on digitalkamera.de seems to be behind a paywall. While I agree that having a sharp lens is great and certainly an interesting exercise to trying to find the sharpest you can for your UW photography and do not in any want to discourage your quest, when under water IMO flexibility is quite important as you can't swap to a more optimal lens like you can on land. Never mind the Ansel Adams quote: "There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept"

Yes you can use the Can 8-15 same as the 10-17. You set the zoom limiter to 10mm and can zoom from 10-15mm with APS-C, better image quality, less zoom range, more weight, and can be used on Marelux compared to the Tokina 10-17 Yes you need to read the fine print in the port charts: this is because the small housings don't have a zoom control it must be on the lens extension and all they offer is the 6"dome in this format Regarding the m43 option , I have the OM-1, you have a lot of options for housings and Isotta is a good option if you want to adapt a Canon 8-15. Here is the parts list in this post: SO you could price out this option. I did it with Nauticam, but it ends up expensive as you need an N85-N120 adapter which are really pricey and Nauticam no longer makes the specific adapter and their ports and extension rings are pricey. I got some of the items second hand. You will need the metabones adapter - the latest model EF-M43 is needed due to geometry of the OM-1, but I have an older version I filed down to fit. The image quality is great though. This gallery is all taken with OM-1 and Canon 8-15: https://www.aus-natural.com/Underwater/Walindi%20Resort%20PNG/index.html I did have a few issues with noise on a couple of deep dives on overcast days, but doing it again I think easily compensated by upping the ISO and shooting a little wider open. Shooting at f8 is generally enough so you can use less powerful strobes. If you can source the FML-3 mini flash to trigger strobes it is a cheap and reliable option for manual triggering. Be aware though in Nauticam the housing ends up quite heavy and needs a fair bit of flotation, the small housing size is less buoyant and the 8-15 is a heavy lump of glass.

In my opinion fisheyes are less sensitive to precise dome position. I took a great deal of time comparing the images at two different dome positions in the linked testing thread. I went as far as downloading the two comparison images and taking a 100% crop from the extreme corners and pasting them together in a single image to compare them. I squinted, compared different areas of the images but I really struggled to see an earth shattering difference in the two images; Here's the post, let me know if you can see anything significant. As far as the the image presented by the OP, the corner crops where it is really blurry all appear to be foreground or background elements that are falling outside the depth of field. It seems like you must be really close as the BG behind the eel's head is quite out of focus, likewise the bottom right crop the foreground rock is quite out of focus it seems. With slightly less magnification you could look at focusing on an important foreground element rather than the subject , other wise crop out objectionable parts of the image or stop down a little more. Also looking at the composition before shooting to avoid large out of focus foreground areas which tend to look more objectionable than background being out of focus. There is is also the fact that images viewed at 100% crop often don't look fantastic, but when presented in the final image and sharpened well, the overall image generally looks great. As Chip said the 2x converter is softening things a little, it provides flexibility more so than the ultimate image sharpness. It's only really possible to do this because the bare 8-15 is such a sharp optic in the first place. You could consider also trying the 1.4x and give up on a little zoom range and trade it off for image sharpness. While it is important to understand the various trade offs in dome ports and fussing over details, eventually you have to just get out and take some images. Work out how to best process and crop them and enjoy the overall image.

Thanks @Vkalia ! - I think he was thinking about smashing me but decided I was too big a target and scurried off, only got 3-4 frames off. I try to do my macro without too many black backgrounds, coming from a land based macro background- black backgrounds were frowned upon unless the subject was nocturnal- it's more of a challenge to get a nice ambient lit BG I think.

Ikelite are fairly unique and were mostly setup to use ikelite strobes with wired connectors but have just started optical triggering recently. They tend to push TTL as they claim no one else knows how to do it. I think after using Nauticam you may find the ikelite housings a bit basic for want of a better word. You need to see what ports they offer and read the fine print for your chosen lens option there are some interesting limitations sometimes. They are also not that compact, basically a big cube with a lot of space inside. They don't offer a compact 4"dome port for fisheyes for example. The dome options for the mirrorless housings like this one are quite limited. the only dome options allowing zoom is the 6.5"dome with a zoom knob on the extension. Unfortunately you picked camera models that only have ikelite or Nauticam housings available. I'd suggest a good start would be to choose your lens options and work back through the ports to available housings to finally arrive at a camera choice. If you wanted a WWL for example the 18-45 is supported for Nauticam and if you can use it on Nauticam you could also set it up on Marelux. If you wanted a 10-17, it takes 20mm less extension than the Canon 8-15 so a Nauticam 10mm extension, however Marelux doesn't seem to have a 10mm extension so it looks like it may be a non starter on that system for R7. You could use a the excellent Canon 8-15 with it though on either system. If you wanted an extremely flexible wide angle setup you could run an adapted Canon 8-15 on m43 and have the ability to zoom from full diagonal fisheye to a field equivalent to a 28mm rectilinear wideangle - full frame equivalent but with barrel distortion from the fisheye. The cheapest way to do that would be in Isotta with a special extension with zoom gear and a 4.5"dome port on their OM-1 housing. So it's a fisheye, part of WWL range setup and a 14-18 (FF equivalent ) lens all in one setup. I use this setup with Nauticam and it is excellent if a little heavy. The m43 sensor is good enough for what I do. On the question of port charts for EF lenses the main housing manufacturers have their systems to allow use of EF lenses on the RF-EF adapter, Nauticam housings for example setup the housings to you can use the recommended ports and zoom gears for your EF lens from the EF port charts with the RF housing and it all works. Isotta has and RF-EF adapter ring, but they don't support the R7. You could also look into the Marelux R7 housings They do support the Canon 8-15.

Don't know what the flight costs are like but you can fly into Singapore from most European cities with a lot of choices of airline and there is a direct flight to Manado with resorts in North sulawesi. I think you can go direct into Jakarta from Amsterdam on Garuda. Then there is a huge array of resorts in Indonesia you could connect to you could check ones that the winds are favourable at from quite a big list. There is also options to Bangkok and getting to Phuket area or Malaysia and various dive spots there. I think Air France flies direct to Manila and lots of resorts to choose from there, You can fly to Bali as well with many options, but mostly 1 stop on the way.

If you need that much flotation I would suggest you don't want it all on the strobe arms, though if you just attach floats with no arms you can place them horizontal rather than vertical. I had 1760 gr in an M formation on my rig and it tool a LOT of torque to point it up even though it was close to neutral. I ended up taking off two smaller float arms and running it negative. I'm thinking of finding some block rigid foam and placing about -400 gr worth under the housing, bolting it on through the tripod screws.

Generally it needs some contaminant to draw in the moisture if humidity is high but not an actual fog that deposits liquid water . Salts draw in water and the deposit becomes conductive. A day to day example is salt shakers that salt clumps up in and stop working. Regularly cleaning contacts should be a good prevention measure.

I would suggest as it's mostly used for macro with a dark BG , colour temperature probably doesn't matter, just adjust white balance to taste, you are not trying to balance ambient light against strobe light generally. Agree it doesn't seem published anywhere and as it's a small linear flash tube, kelvin value is probably high.

The 30mm macro is limited to about 0.5x for practical purposes, min focus of 1:1 is close to right on the port glass and hard to achieve and light. The 60mm macro is the best option IMO, the Pany 45mm is also a possibility, but the lens will probably cost more. If you want only one macro lens for me 60mm > 45mm > 30mm. The only downside of the 60mm is you have to backup quite a bit for bigger subjects.