Chris Ross

I'm using the MFO3, took it to Lembeh last year and got quite a bit of use out of it. Also using it in Sydney diving. On the same dive I could swap between shooting a gyrating Harlequin sweetlips with 60 and a 500mm long trumpet fish adding on the MFO3. The reason for using it is you have the 60mm capability when you need and can switch pretty quickly to the 36-37mm focal length of the MFO3, you don't get that reach with the 14-42 and macro is more of a challenge. It seems to me there are advantages to be able to shoot the smallest fish with the 60mm over the 14-42. Focusing seems very straight forward with the MFO3, I didn't notice any hunting when using it and if you look at the EXIF you are shooting between 2m and infinity on the lens as reported in the EXIF for the most part (the subject is of course much closer) . This is the range where the 60mm is quite snappy. I would add that the 14-42 once you get to the long end is reported to be not the sharpest knife in he drawer while the MFO3 is sharp across the frame as it corrects for the aberrations caused by shooting through a flat port. At the 36-37mm focal length the 14-42 would be experiencing those aberrations behind a flat port. Here's a brief review of using the MFO3 with the 60mm macro:

If you look at the colour spaces Macs use DCI-P3 which is a little smaller than Adobe RGB and is extended in reds/yellows more so than blues/green that Adobe RGB covers better. This diagram shows the coverage of various colour spaces:

I agree in principle, One thing that seems apparent there are quite a few flavours of TTL among different strobes, you just have to look at the UWT triggers which have multiple different settings for all the different strobes and a different trigger model for each camera brand. I believe the timings are different with each type of TTL and I suspect this is a reason TTL is regarded as unreliable underwater as up until recently a universal slave TTL was all that was available. I heard somewhere that Olympus RC is open source so it does not need reverse engineering to make it work so in principle UW strobes that work with RC mode will work as well as any Olympus strobe on land when shooting TTL. It was also specifically setup to send TTL commands optically. This is probably the reason it might work a little better.

No problem, they are nice to work with - right! One thing to remember, if you are posting these, browser are mostly default colour managed now, however they will assume your image is sRGB unless it is tagged otherwise, You do need to keep the colour profile in the file, there is generally a check box to include the colour profile in the file when you save. Unfortunately you need the good monitor to see the benefit, Apple users will be close, but if they are being viewed by photography enthusiasts they are more likely to have a good monitor.

You can get very close with it, it compresses the range that will focus quite a bit, I haven't tested the limits of it at the short end, but the port chart says it will focus from 0-1500mm and get to 0.8x implying it will focus from the glass out to 1.5m away. If I need to get super close, it seems the best solution is often to remove the MFO3 and use the bare lens as you will get more magnification and working distance. The exception would be murky water with particles and you want to get closer to reduce backscatter.

Guide numbers can be quite misleading, A lot depends on how the light is distributed in the beam. Quite a few strobe tests have been posted on here in the last couple of years, it's probably about the best comparison you could find. Assume you've looked at the pinned strobe comparison table in this forum, the spreadsheet linked has larger images.

There have been some threads discussing this, I recall there is a quality uplift, but don't recall how dramatic.

sorry no, best to DM I think, you could try looking through his posts you might see something there?

I would expect that the TTL of the maxi would use the same protocols as other recent Retra strobes. I found this reference to TTL performance of a 4th generation Retra here:

In principle the way to do this is fairly easy, you just need to work out the right extension. I see the Seacam port chart mentions that is using a converted lens with Metabones to use to the PVL25 extension and that the zoom ring is a special. To that you would need to add extension equivalent to the thickness of the converter in question. Presumably you use the recommended Canon extension with the PVL 25, but you would need to confirm that with Seacam and also ask them if they can help you with a zoom ring, otherwise you would need to have one printed. I would also add that the compact dome or one of the fisheye ports would be more flexible for this setup if you want to do CFWA as you can get quite a bit closer.

Thanks for this, though possibly better 18650 batteries may now be available? I suspect you method has some validity, if the strobe has more power in your test it probably is also brighter in comparison for a quick burst, but I guess it depends on how the strobe is programmed to deal with continuous shots. In addition using 3 18650 (assuming) in series, the voltage is higher so less demanding on amp draw.

edge at the moment, it's a work machine, usually use firefox on home machine, won't be home for a few days yet. I can post some examples. Edge claims to be fully colour managed. checking on this page confirms fully colour managed: Is your system ICC Version 4 ready?

Facebook applies its own profile to save storage space. This forum also does some things to images including stripping metadata and for some reason images I upload from my Win 10 desktop have the life sucked out of them , while images I upload from my win11 laptop look a lot better. I can see very little difference between the two in these examples, which could be due to what the forum software does to the images?

You could get a microsoft surface pro, they are close to a tablet in size, even with the keyboard cover, then you have a full featured system and can use regular applications to do your sorting and keywording.

Perhaps, but many more people can see Adobe RGB these days, I-phone and Macbooks can display DCI-P3 which gets around 90% of Adobe RGB and many laptops have similar capabilities these days if they are not base models. Even my fairly basic Yoga 7 covers DCI-P3 and extends towards covering Adobe RGB.

Ikelite recommend it to be used with a fisheye and the specifically for CFWA, the lens needs to be up in the dome to not vignette and the entrance pupil is right up front. So for that and many wide angle lenses it will vignette if you attempt to place the EP at the centre of curvature. The sample pics provided look OK but they 1024 x 1024 images so at lets partly cropped and a little small to judge critical sharpness but they certainly look OK on the website at that size.

Yes, I use it for air based macro and wildlife. Even dabble in Astro work with it. This sunbird image for example is with the OM-1 plus 300mm f4/1.4x: Australian Natural Images and this is a focus stack with OM-1 + 90mm macro of a thumbnail sized terrestrial orchid: Australian Natural Images

What happens now is most browsers assume the image is sRGB if it's not tagged, but if tagged in Adobe RGB they will render it as such. I have a printer at home which is capable of printing Adobe RGB colours and specialised print shops will also take Adobe RGB images as they have printers that can reproduce those colours. Of course if have a monitor that is restricted to sRGB colours you can't see the benefit as the monitors cannot reproduce the colours, I can assure you the colour difference is real on blue tropical water.

I think that is what Isotta is doing for mirrorless housings using F mount lenses, at least a similar concept I think.

If you compare the Nikon and Canon housings from Nauticam there are some differences as Nauticam places the camera about 20mm further back in the housing to provide space for the Z-F converter so that the focus gear for F lenses sists in the same position. So the Nauticam housings will be thicker. I know a few people who went with Isotta for Nikon mrrorless as it was a lot more compact for them.

the thing to do would be take a series of shots at different focus distances. If none of them are sharp then perhaps it's a lens problem. Include a ruler resting at 45 degrees within the shot so you can see how sharpness changes with distance. It may shed some light on the issue.

Ikelite seem to promote using this dome with a fisheye for CFWA, the discussions mention that the edges of the image may not be great and imply it's not important. Fisheyes seem less prone to problems with dome positioning but you usually won't see the problems in a 1024 pixel wide image on the web. Rectilinear lenses show more pronounced problems if not positioned correctly. You can look at the post by Dreifish here to see some examples of different dome positions: Testing Nauticam N120 Port Extension for 140mm and 180mm domes with wide angle lenses - Photography Gear and Technique - WaterPixels Keep in mind that these domes are maybe up to 10-15mm out of ideal position, the dome you mention will be much further from the correct position for many lenses. One of the problems is that most test images you can find online might be up to 1200 pixels wide and it is hard to find problems in such images.

The other issue is that if you haven't used good equipment you don't really know what is possible and people looking at it on smart phones won't know the difference as suggested. To me the phrase "do this instead" means it promoting some dodgy scheme, supplement or whatever and I resist clicking on the link. In the same class as "xxxxx doesn't want you to know this"

Yes for photos if you are going to print you need to turn down the display otherwise your prints come out too dark. Also a matte display tends to be better by avoiding reflections it's easier on the eyes. The thing with sRGB vs Adobe RGB particularly for blues, you don't know what you are missing until you edit on an Adobe RGB monitor and convert to sRGB. The blues really are much nicer.

what do you mean by using the focus guides - are you using focus peaking?