Chris Ross

Here it is with the adapter attached: and the two parts:

It comes with an M67 adapter that you thread on so that the threads protrude from the end like a regular diopter or filter. I think it shuould be fine with most flips.

Agree that turning up the strobes is your option, for red focus light a red LED I think will be best, red filters let through quite a bit of light in other wavelengths. The flash is so short they often won't react. Same with shutter speed it has no influence in the dark, just set it at you sync speed, you won't record any anything from the focus light at that shutter speed so having it turn off when the strobe fires is not really necessary.

the lens alone gets to 1.4x while adding an SMC-3 gets to to 2.4x, so still an improvement in usable magnification range I would venture. The min magnification without a diopter is possibly greater than 1.4x? . With the older lens you would jump straight from 1:1 to diopter min magnification which might be 1.5 to 1.6x

same as Goretex doesn't really work in the tropics, the humidity and/or temperature inside the suit has to be higher than outside to create a driving force for the water vapout to cross the membrane. Much easier to achieve in cold climates.

the lens alone gets to 1.4x while adding an SMC-3 gets to to 2.4x, so still an improvement in usable magnification range I would venture. The min magnification without a diopter is possibly greater than 1.4x? . With the older lens you would jump straight from 1:1 to diopter min magnification which might be 1.5 to 1.6x range?

Hi Nicole, welcome aboard, hope you find the site useful. getting a rig you can travel with a popular topic of discussion on the forums!

Seems to me it could use a short lens hood for a bit more protection for the front glass?

It builds character or something like that I'm told. Seriously though, it can be very rewarding! I've heard there are some people who dive dry in the tropics in 30 deg water though, maybe that's a solution for sub 30 degree water?🥶😄

You should try out Sydney diving, I started a gym program to improve leg strength and general fitness ( a gym junkie I'm not) makes a big difference, But diving in Sydney involves traipsing down to the entry 20m below by steep narrow steps. Diving dry means 15kg of lead, and my steel tank is 17 kg full. It keeps you in shape for traipsing through airports with all your gear. Summer diving is a comparative luxury with lead reduced to 8kg.

The fresnel is basically a large lens and it will form an image at its focal point. In this case you have the frosted glass in front so it will try to form and image of that, but it needs enough room to form the image. The problem you have is that it makes a cone of light that is smallest at the focus point and then gets larger beyond the focus point. so getting the light to travel down the tube without hitting the walls and being absorbed is the issue. You could take your frosted glass and place it in a cardboard mask and have a light source behind it then take the fresnel and move it back and forth to see what size spot it forms. to get the light into the tube you want a spot the same diameter as the tube. This you c coul use to determine how far to place the fresnel from the tube. If the light goes into the tube the cone is still going to try to expand so maybe paintin the inside white so it bounces around in there might help? Otherwise you would be looking at building a collimator to get parallel light rays in your beam. You could look into raytracing software but I think it's a fairly steep learning curve setting up software to model what you are trying to correctly. One example of what you are trying to do is the "better beamer" strobe attachment for bird photos it narrows the strobe beam from something covering the field of a 100-200mm lens to something covering a 300-400mm lens it quoted as increasing strobe light by 2 stops or so. See this link: Shutter MuseBetter Beamer Flash Extender ReviewThe Better Beamer Flash Extender is used by many wildlife photographers to extend the range of a standard hot shoe flash. But is it any good?If you can concentrate the beam enough just sampling from this beam using a tube up front may be enough?

The fundamental problem you are dealing with is that you have a strobe beam that is between 90 and 130-150deg wide and you are trying to cram this into a small tube,. Optically this is kind of like a fisheye lens in reverse. There was a thread on the relatively low output from the Rreta LSD when used on their strobes some time back and I think the Inon strobe had less power loss. This purely down to geometry, I did a calculation on this that showed only a small percentage of the beam actually entered into lens on the LSD. So if you use a fresnel to capture the beam it needs to be as big as the strobe front dia, any light that doesn't make it into the fresnel is lost. Then once you capture all that light it needs to be turned into a more parallel beam.

I thought it was quite clear started after 50

There is another thread on this and for some reason search is not very good at finding it. Here is the key post on this thread: https://waterpixels.net/forums/topic/2495-my-experience-with-the-mfo-1/#findComment-16547 Basically the MFO-1 is a very high quality low power diopter first and foremost and the hunting improvement is a secondary benefit which varies depending on the lens being used with it.

This is correct however I didn't have 1:1 working distance and the point really is that a change of 37mm in working distance is quite significant. I went to the photons to photos website and looked up the Sony 90mm macro and the Canon RF 100mm to check how focal length changes, they didn't seem to have the new Sony lens there which is not surprising, but the Canon RF100 will be quite similar in performance. You can use the sheet for each lens to look at the performance at various focus distances and it reports magnification and working distance. The Sony 90mm reduces to 45mm focal length at 1:1 with a 130mm working distance while the CanonRF 100mm at is 120mm working distance and 47mm focal length at 1:1. At 1.4x the Canon reduces to 92mm working distance with 36mm focal length. This is borne out in the port charts if you look at all the different lenses, the max magnification reported for the SMC-3 is as follows: with SMC3 Focal length Working Distance Sony 90mm 2.3x 45mm 130mm Sony 100mm 2.4x ?? 92mm Canon RF100mm 2.3x 36mm 120mm At 1.4x focus Canon EF100mm 2.2x 74mm 134mm At 1.0x focus You can see that the figures reported for the new Sony 100mm lens are consistent with other similar lenses, particularly the Canon RF100 which also achieves 1.4x has similar working distance at max magnification and achieves similar magnification to the Sony 90mm and Canon 100m lenses with a diopter. I would expect the design of the Sony 100mm is broadly similar to that of the Canon at least as far as reduction in focal length and working distance goes.

The Retra Pro Max II and the HF-1 are near equal in power ouptut as I recall and the power of the Max is 140 Ws vs 190 Ws for the Max II. 50 WS sounds like a lot more power but to be one full stop more power it would need to have an power rating of 240 Ws. One stop is double the light. So if looking only at brightness you would be get the same results on the MAx with the ISO raised by about 2/3 stop so ISO 160 instead of ISO100 for example. Recycle time of course is different, but it seems like a significant expense for not a huge mount more power to me.

Should is the operative word. The problem is that most of these strobe protocols are reverse engineered and the reverse engineering may not have identical timings etc so one strobe might work with their own trigger but not with another vendor's trigger and vice versa. Or it could be that the light from the trigger is too weak for the S&S strobe to work in HSS? Or perhaps the firmware in the EM-10 is not up to the task? The issue is that HSS sync should work with within RC mode but the trigger in the AOI housing doesn't communicate well enough with the S&S strobe to make it happen You could perhaps check with AOI if their new UIS-P1 strobe will provide this functionality with your trigger?

I recall you have an EM-10 mKIV in an AOI housing? As far as I know the YS-D3 duo is supposed to support RC mode with a compatible trigger and AOI claims their trigger works in RC mode. however based on this thread the YS-D3 duo is supposed to support HSS in RC mode but doesn't work with the AOI trigger for some reason. Maybe the signal is too weak? This means it might not be as simple as just getting new strobes - you need to confirm that whatever strobe you pick will work with the AOI trigger. The AOI trigger can either be a manual trigger or an RC mode trigger. It seems that whatever strobe you choose needs to be RC mode compatible and actually work with the built in AOI trigger. This is quite specific and maybe you could ask some retailers for options that would work. It might actually be cheaper to get a different housing if one could be found which allows you to add either a UWT type trigger or to use a Nauticam style manual trigger which will get you to 1/400 shutters peed without HSS. A second hand EM-1 MKII with a Nauticam housing might fit the bill.

The magnification achieved by a diopter is related to the focal length of the macro lens used. With the same diopter a longer focal length lens will have greater magnification. The Sony 100mm has a longer focal length - at infinity focus, however internal focus macro lenses lose focal length as they focus closer and to get the 1.4x magnification the 100mm macro focuses significantly closer at max magnification. Working distance for the new lens is calculated at 92mm while the old 90mm macro had 129mm working distance. This is quite a reduction in working distance and probably indicates a significantly shorter focal length compared to the old lens when operating at minimum focus distance, so the diopter gives less magnification. You will see the working distance for SMC-3 at max magnification has reduced from 22 to 17mm so there is no room to reduce working distance any further. Also see that the magnification for the MFO-1 has increased from1.2x to 1.5x on the new 100mm lens. I believe this data is from Nauticam doing tests on the lens with their recommended ports and diopters.

See what Image science in Melbourne recommend they have a big section on how to print, printing workflows etc. and will recommend the best calibrators etc. I bought my printer and calibrator there. I also usually get my paper and ink there and bought my Eizo monitors there. no affiliation, just a customer.

One thing I would caution is that salt water and some luggage zips don't mix. I used a carry on size samsonite case for my camera ona few trips and used it to carry onto the boats where despite precautions got some salt water on the zippers, they started seizing up constantly after that even after cleaning exercising and zipper wax. The pulls corroded on them. My dive gear specific bag was loaded up with wet dive gear quite a few times and the zip is still good on that. You won't always be able to dry your gear before packing it away.