Chris Ross

To BJS, the OP I should add, we are in the same city if you want to see the Equipment in person feel free to contact me.

IMO dynamic range is nice, but rarely critical UW, If you look at ambient images the histogram is squashed into the middle and needs to be stretched to get a decently contrasty image. The sole exception might be sunballs, but It seems that high sync speed is your biggest requirement there. and the dynamic range progressively goes away as you increase ISO. I don't doubt the images look great, but for me the the m43 sensor is more than adequate for what I do. If you like to look at sensor data plots you'll see that The Nikon D800 and the A7RV are very very close with mainly slightly more dynamic range at a given ISO. In fact the EM-1 MkII matches the D800 ISO400 dynamic range at ISO200 and it hardly drops at 400. It's a similar story for noise. Where full frame really comes into play is at much higher ISOs which are not that commonly needed UW. I have seen remarkable shots at high ISO out of the OM-1 though. This shot at ISO6400 I found quite nice, the shadows are blocked but FF and infinite dynamic range won't help the feathers have microstructure that makes them close to the blackest object known, they just don't reflect light. https://500px.com/photo/1111734237/magnificent-riflebird-or-papua-by-petr-bambousek

Either the Panasonic or Olympus 8mm fisheye is very light and affordable and they work well in a 4"dome. Agree though the AF in the OM1 and EM5 is way better than the old series like EM-5II - mainly a benefit when using the 60mm macro lens which was relatively sluggish on the EM-5 II. I upgraded to the EM-1 mKII 8 years ago it was way better than the old EM-5 II. If you are concerned about expense a second hand EM-1 MII or III in an aluminium housing would be a great option. The OM-1 and OM-5 are better but not as much of a step up as the EM-5 II to EM-1 II.

I shoot the OM-1 in Nauticam, quite happy with it. I didn't downgrade from full frame UW, though I went from using a Canon 1DIV on land to olympus as well . I still have the 1DIV and Canon lenses including a 500mm f4 and 180mm macro , but I've switched over to using the OM-1 for all of that and the Canon gear only gets used very occasionally as the OM-1 is every bit as good and for land based macro using focus stacking among other features easily surpasses the Canon and other full frame options. There are others here who have gone Full frame to APS-C and never regretted it such my fellow moderator @TimG . My feeling these days is APS-C is a bit of an orphan child with lens range a little limited in some ways. I used to try to shoot everything so that I could print big!! but I've found in reality I almost never do. Other advantages include you don't need to stop down so much so you can shoot lower ISO as you are at least 1 stop further open compared to FF, this means smaller cheaper flash units will work for you. The lens lineup is very complete with excellent macro, rectilinear wide (14-28, 16-35 equivalent etc.) and fisheye options. The lenses are cheaper than full frame and a lot smaller as are the ports required. On the full frame question, a lot depends on what you want to use the images for and I can see two main reasons for wanting full frame these days -1. you make your living from the images and clients demand it and 2. You want (and actually do) make large prints - I'm talking A2 size and bigger. The 20 MP sensor in the OM-1 can print A3 natively at 300 dpi and up-ressing to A2 is quite feasible, it's starts to suffer a little beyond that. A third reason might be you can afford it, can put up with size and weight and you want to. Ports and lenses in m43 are quite a bit cheaper as are the housings. I have the 60mm macro, which is my most used, the 12-40 in a 170mm dome and now use the an adapted Canon 8-15 fisheye in the 140mm dome for wide angle - you can't get this so cheaply in any other system. It combines a full diagonal fisheye with a 14-28 equivalent lens and includes much of the range of a WWL setup in one package. Full frame requires either Sony and the same adapted 8-15 lens with a Sony 2x or using the very expensive Fisheye conversion port. Amazing flexibility and image quality and uniquely micro43 allows you the most flexibility. Only downside is it needs lots of flotation to get near neutral. Your two main housing options are Nauticam and Isotta. I started with Nauticam and I'm bought into this system, but Isotta for example would allow you to do the Canon 8-15 significantly cheaper. I can pack my setup including housing, ports, camera, lenses and two strobes into a carry on size photo backpack. Feel free to ask more specific questions about shooting with the OM-1. There's lots of images on my website and most recent ones since about late 2023 are with the OM-1. You can also find my gallery here on Waterpixels.

The biggest problem is there are so many junk enclosures out there. I did find this active cooled one which claims to be very quiet: Simplecom Dual Bay NVMe M.2 SSD...Simplecom Dual Bay NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure Offline Clone D...Buy Simplecom Dual Bay NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure Offline Clone Docking Station (SD560) - Buy Now, Pay Later + FREE pick-up & same day dispatch!None of the specs though mention anything about DRAM or SLC- cache? I usually buy Samsung storage for my SSDs, was supposed to be the "best" a few years back but haven't researched recently. My internal HDD on my desktop tower is a Samsung 4TB SSD 2.5"form factor, but I'm still using a spinning backup drive in an external enclosure. I'm thinking about what I'll update it with down the track?? But back to the OP, any SSD with a 200MB/sec card and good reader will eat a system using a spinning HDD plugged into a laptop I would think.

Welcome Isobel, hope you enjoy the forum.

You Tube does auto bit rate and sizing it seems, On my big screen the video is often obviously stretched but looks a lot better on a smaller screen. The biggest thing is it will degrade the quality if the connection is not great. I just watched at home on a decent connection on my big screen and your footage looks pretty good. Smaller screens need a lower bitrate to look good. The footage under the overhang looks a bit familiar - quite like a shot I got from the Labyrinth divesite a few years back now.

As others have said you need a fast drive and fast card reader together with fast cards. Just picking any old card reader can be quite slow ( and don't even talk about plugging your camera for many cameras - it's a lot slower) I'm using a Sandisk mutli card Pro reader which gets decent speed. I assume macs report download speed when emptying drives - what does yours report? I get 160 MB/sec with a Sandisk card labelled as 200MB/sec which are pretty cheap these days. The cable I'm using might be slowing it down a touch, but haven't tried other combinations. I could probably get something faster but it would involve time and effort and $$ and most of the time the download is done in a few minutes. That card reader is reported to get 295-300 MB/sec with Sandisk 300MB/sec rated cards. For best speed you want to have two ports on your PC, one for the card reader and one for the storage which is going to fastest as a SSD. I've haven't heard a lot of good things about Lacie drives in fact any external drive using spinning drives bought as a complete unit. I've always used external enclosures, preferably with fan cooling and they are generally reliable.

Thanks @Alex_Mustard , certainly seems like it would be useful for the type of shots I take locally (and for a forthcoming trip to Lembeh!!) The question I have is will it work with micro43? The Olympus 60mm macro is a nice lens and works very well, but it's a bit too long at 120mm equivalent, unless you are on quite small subjects. Switching to a ~30mm macro when I come across a weedie or Eastern Blue devil fish or even a red indian fish and other similar sized subjects would be perfect. I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work except perhaps I'm mostly working at f8-10. Which flip adapter are you using? Is it the one for MWL-1? On the brighter image question I would say if adding a 1.4x TC loses one stop of exposure, then adding the inverse of that - about a 0.7x converter would gain you a stop of exposure. You probably need to add into the equation that the lens is focusing a little closer and this may lose some light. What you actually end up with probably depends on exactly how the optics were designed.

Yes 740 grams would be about right, the photos above have been changed since I made the comment.

Welcome aboard. Hope you find the forum useful. If you haven't done much UW photography for 20 years I would venture that you might struggle equally with film or digital and you might as well take the leap now, assuming you know what you want to buy. At least with digital you can review your pics immediately and make corrections. In general terms the settings you use on film will translate across to digital directly, though the images won't necessarily look the same.

A couple of times I've come back from a dive and the swell had picked up - not fun. One time the divemaster was trying to get people out through waves breaking on rocks. A few of us had enough air left and dropped back down and swam to a beach with better protection to get out. Quite familiar with the swell trying to suck you back out again, we can get a bit of a washing machine happening at the steps sometimes and I got caught in it once or twice in the early days.

I think you might need new scales, the listed weight for the new Retra is 838 grams. If it was 51 grams it would float. I got a pair of Retra pures about a month ago and it seems a nice upgrade to my old Z240s. With the reduction rings fitted seems I get a lot less backscatter than with the Z240.

Hi Bruce and welcome. Do you have a regular Sydney dive site?

They expected you to climb the ladder 😅 life is so tough! But seriously boat dives in the tropics are something else - just fall off the boat - hopefully somewhat gracefully. Even here the boat dives are relatively luxurious, though we don't have gear slaves.

Interesting, never heard of them before now! My first thought is that if it's for video cameras from around 2000 time frame it would be designed around relatively small imaging sensors? I assumed you have asked Google, I had a look and found a Wetpixel article from 2003 (mostly buzz and fluff, but did mention a few cameras it might work with) it mentions that fathom port working with the 1/3"sensor on the VX2000 (6.0 mm diagonal size) Also found that Fathom imaging is still a going concern offering UW correction lenses so should be contactable. My second thought is that if you know what lenses it was designed for you could take look them up to get an idea of what sort of specs they have and match them up with modern lenses you might be able to use. For example the VX-2000 mentioned on the WP page has a min focus distance of 300mm for the factory lens - though the article does talk about using a custom Gates lens as well. Do you know the model name for the fathom lens?

It could also be your strobes I guess if they are slow to charge up?

@humu9679 If I take my time it's not too bad, breathing hard at the top but seem to recover fairly quickly. it soon reminds you if you are a bit out of shape. The worst is spring with warm air but still very cold water, you get steamed on the way down. SO you try to minimise time between zipping up your suit and jumping in the water. It also tests out your leg strength and stability getting down as much as up. I had to do some weight training after I had a minor knee ligament problem and lost strength in that leg. Diving dry I'm carrying 40-45 kg in cylinders, lead, suit and camera.

It would be good also to find out the material they use for the styrofoam collars on the WWl and others that seems like it is good to 100m so should have a compressive strength around 10 bar/1000 kPa. The highest compressive strength I found was 700 kPa or so and density up around 50 kg/m3, but most data sheets just put down >100 or something, I think that's a spec value for some common use and if it meets that they just report >spec. I seem to recall people talking about using yoga blocks which seem quite robust, but I seem to recall people reporting that they collapse at depth.

I must say I'm liking the fact all our dive sites are sandstone based, much less likely to damage you, though they have their fair share of "if it's black you're on your back" areas. Carrying a camera certainly does up the ante in making sure the entry is not too rough. Standard procedure on exit here is to crawl out till you are beyond the reach of any swell coming in, wouldn't fancy doing that on lava even with kevlar knees in my suits.

The other question to ask is if the firmware is up to date? - you may be missing some updates which are related to the overheating issue.

The thing that allows higher currents in batteries is the internal resistance of the battery itself, the black eneloops have lower internal resistance which is the reason they charge faster.

I came across some articles about counterfeit eneloops such as this one: BaltradeWe are testing cheap batteries signed with the Eneloop lo...Recently, our customers and readers have been receiving disturbing information that Panasonic Eneloop rechargeable batteries of dubious quality have appeared on the market. After analyzing the info... It's a possibility these are circulating and worth checking your batteries. I checked my white and black eneloops and found they both had the rough porous looking material on the -ve terminal that is mentioned in the link. I should mention I have not noticed a noticeable difference between the black and white eneloops from just using them, they should perform similarly and the difference detected would need to some additional effort like logging numbers of shots taken and potentially discharge testing to be able to pick if you are getting more shots from one vs the other.

Hi everyone, I came across this post on Instagram from a Lynne Tuck who is a regular diving at my local site called The Steps at Kurnell (Sydney Australia). Be nice if the pace was a little slower but you get the idea of what it takes to get to the water. This is my most dived local site with a great variety of critters many unique to this area. I must have done around 200 dives on this site. This is temperate water site - 7mm wetsuit in the warmer months for me and a drysuit in winter where the water drops to the 13-14° range. The car park is around 25m above sea level. Nearby is the leap where the descent is closer to 30m elevation and you drift on the incoming tide to exit at this site after about a 250m drift. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLzqoY-o4aZ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== Thought it would be fun to post a reply to this thread with pics or videos that shows how you access your local tough site. We can get an idea of what your local diving is like.

It can be hard to tell if you re 1:1 and a regular DSLR type lens you can wind it out there and then move in on the subject knowing you re at max magnification. With AF it can be fiddly to get there as i=you could drift inside min focus. Not all mirrorless lenses work this - the Olympus 60mm macro focus just keeps turning with no stop at minimum and it's also slow to change focus. It depends on which particular macro lens you are using. Some camera systems have full time manual focus in AF which would be ideal, switching back and forth between MF and AF.