Chris Ross

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.

The mA-hr rating is only part of the picture, the main reason they are recommended as I recall is the low internal resistance, which means two things, first they push out the charge very quickly and secondly it minimises heat build up. I suspect the battery mentioned above that got hot would not perform as well as this indicates internal resistance is higher. I use both the regular white eneloops and the eneloop pro. Particularly for local diving I find the regular eneloops are perfectly fine as I'll often just do a single dive taking 100 or so shots. I generally use the eneloop pros when on a trip though, doing 3-4 dives daily with 100+ shots per dive. The white eneloops I use in my land flashes a lot where changing them out is not a big deal.

Mine tends not to be a camera problem, I tend to be a lazy photographer sometimes.

True but there I still come across people who think it's a backup. I don't work in IT but know enough about it to get in trouble regularly. 🤣 I know backups well enough, still doesn't mean i do them as often as I should unfortunately.🤔 The most basic rule is don't format your card till the stuff you have downloaded from it has been backed up. I'm going to need to expand my storage soon the 4TB main drive and backup are starting to get full.

I gave up on using RAID a long time back as I worked out it's not really a backup, it's just a means to have the storage stay on line is a physical disk in the array fails and it's quite possible the hardware can fail and take out the whole array. It always seemed problematic to add more storage as well - quite likely I didn't know what I was doing, but it always seemed like another flaming hoop to jump through. I use duplicated large capacity drives these days. I also found coming back to an old HDD that I had not used for a number of years was a problem. I had 3 smaller disks in a RAID5 array stored in their original packaging and when I came back to them after a number of years to see if they worked before either disposing or recycling them I found I couldn't format 2 out of the 3. They worked just fine when I transferred their files to single big drive years previously. My percentage clean up is a bit more than yours though for most dives, I seem to make a lot of bad shots!🤣

Your problem is the strobes don't know what the camera is doing, so if you have manual strobes the exposure is only correct at one ISO, but if the camera changes that the strobes still fire the same burst if they are on manual. Seems like a recipe for frustration. sTTL may have a chance to work as the camera will vary the flash output to adjust exposure. The issue is going to be how well the camera interprets the UW scene and what it tries to do with it, so you are likely to need flash exposure compensation as well which may or may not be quick to get to and adjust. Put it another way if sTTL works for you with fixed ISO it should also work with variable ISO, within a small range. If the ISO moves too much you might run into problems and need to move SS or aperture to deal with it. The other issue is going to be that at least for daylight reef photos you are often pushing up against your sync limit and it won't take much to reach it so the the range the ISO can move is probably boxed right in. So might as well use fixed ISO. For macro with black or dark backgrounds the auto ISO is going to try to make that neutral grey so I can't see auto ISO working that well, again depending on how well your camera's TTL reads a scene like that.

On the why I expect it's to reduce the number of different housings they make, they have been trimming their port charts from discontinued lenses and dropping various adapters and ports as well. Possibly offering 3 different port systems (4 if you count the compacts) might be taking its toll. You could also look to other vendors, Isotta is about $2k cheaper for the housing for example.

You could also carve a whole float collar out of such material if you have the dimensions, just do the volume calculations if you know the foam density. It would need a steady hand with a hot wire cutter to make it neat though. Mozaik still list the buoyancy collar for WWL-1 for $92CAD and they ship out of Vancouver. You could also check them for the Stix collar. they seem to have a coupon code for 12% off - no tariffs. If you used the Nauticam buoyancy collar and assuming you are shooting stills not video you could take that weight into account with float arms

Most mirrorless FF cameras have some version of this as an option, you still however have to pay $$ extra for the housing and camera and need to check the fine print on how it does video in such a situation. If it's playing intermittently could be an issue with the RF-EF adapter or some sort of contact issue.

Perhaps, but first you have to find one and keep it alive. T here's no substituent for a proper AF fisheye IMO and a fisheye zoom is just so versatile, which is why people are mucking around with using Sony 2x on on an adapted Canon 8-15. With the Canon 8-15 being discontinued it means that even if it's replaced by an RF version it only helps CANON RF users and won't be adaptable to Sony. Nikon still seems to be making their 8-15 for now though.

I have been looking around at various foam options to make a float for my rig, a lot of places have the foam used for insulation under house slabs which is specified as high density and low water absorption and densities in the range of 30-33kg/m3. This means it has a buoyancy of about 970 kg/m3 or 0.97 gr/cm3. According to the page for the original WWL-1 float collar the lens is 160 gr negative UW with the collar. so it would need about 160/0.97 = 165 cm3 of 30kg/m3 foam. This is a cube about 5.5 cm or 2.1" on a side. If you can source some of this foam you could carve out a piece in the shape of an arc matched to the OD of float collar about 20cm long x 4cm wide and 2 cm thick and glue/screw it to the float collar you already have. With a bit of searching you could probably find a piece of the foam at an art supply place - it's used for sculpture, you would look for XPS foam with a density of 30-35 kg/m3.

I don't trim down by that much, but I'll throw all the obviously out of focus stuff, missed subject, accidental triggers etc and keep what's sharp and half-way well composed as Raw files and keep them in site specific folders. I'll also throw duplicates if I have lots of near identical shots. Process the selects to tiffs and jpegs to master folders . Eventually they make their way to my website where they are subject or trip organized. Nothing particularly scientific, but it keeps the storage requirements reasonable. My images library probably takes up about 2.5-3 TB in various folders. I have 4TB SSD storage drive and a conventional 4TB backup in an enclosure. It enough to keep 30+ years of images. I lost some scanned images quite a few years back during the process of upgrading PCs as far as I can tell, but the last 25-30 years worth of images are still there. My thoughts are that is the storage requirements are reasonable and it's organised enough to find an image with just a few minutes searching this is enough.

As far as I know just turn it on before closing the housing. I've seen people report the battery lasts a very long time. That's a very well used looking R5 though, my old 1DMkIV looks in way better nick.

Didn't realise it's discontinued. Doesn't bode well for UW photographers. Even if Canon bring out an RF version it won't be readily adaptable to other systems like the EF version.

Well that solved an issue for me, I have an Atomos shinobi I use on land for macro focus stacking and diving deep into the menus to set HDMI output to match the monitor means it now switches instantly to display an image and connects up way faster. Now if only I could stop the camera switching off focus bracketing when a monitor is plugged in!

Depth of field with just a lens at constant aperture varies directly with magnification. So if you frame up the subject the same way with the same size in frame depth of field on the subject will be the same or very close when just using a lens without domes and virtual images. As you get closer and the subject gets larger the the depth of field goes down. You can frame it with a longer focal length from further away or up close with a wide angle - if the subject size is the same the depth of field remains pretty much the same. Behind a dome the depth of field goes up as the min focus to infinity image is compressed into 3 dome radii. Of course the dome needs to be positioned properly if the lens is too far inside the dome you lose some of the in focus range as it's inside the port. Now if you compare the 8-15 with 2x behind a dome and the FCP, the zoom range is near identical just slightly more reach for the long end on the FCP and both focus on the dome so they can achieve the same subject size. In this situation the FCP has less depth of field than the 8-15. It only makes sense to compare DOF at the same magnification, a bigger subject size in frame means the depth of field will be less. As to why the FCP has less depth of field I don't know, perhaps the virtual image is not as compressed and you lose the DOF advantage you have with a lens behind a dome? The way the background appears does vary with focal length so taking an image right up close with something like a 24mm lens then taking the same image with a 500mm lens (on land) you will see a dramatic difference in the bokeh or background blur, but in UW photography you don't get into such extremes

Massimo tested the Nauticam CMC lenses and INON lenses a while back and produced a video which would be on his site. He shows photos of a ruler at max magnification so you could back calculate the power. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ_zYSw9o94

Presumably this is a Nauticam flash trigger which would be manual only. So set the camera to manual plug it into the hotshoe and turn the trigger on, fire a test shot and check the LEDs flash. The camera shouldn't even know it's there. Once you have it flashing you should be able to install it in the housing and attach your optic fibre cables and fire away. If it's another brand you might need to do something else, but if you confirm it's Nauticam this is how it should work.

It wasn't expressed well, but I was specifically referring to the FCP which is what an 8-15 with 2x emulates. Reports are that the FCP seem to have more limited DOF. I can't comment on the specifics of depth of field of the WWL/WACP, though I suspect they have similar lens designs to the FCP. In general depth of field after you've accounted for aperture is related solely to magnification. The image scale at the wide means depth of field is generally pretty good and being behind a dome the depth of field is compressed into the virtual image which extends from touching the dome to about 3 dome radii. On a 140mm dome that's about the edge of the dome to about 210mm away. The lens also only knows about the virtual image as that is what it images. So the end result is that depth of field is higher than shooting the same scene without a dome. The FCP though seems to be doing something different possibly making a much bigger virtual image or something similar as the examples showed in the thread back when it was released certainly seemed to have less DOF than you would expect.

I think it was explained above that the idea behind it was for a low powered wet lens to give about 1.2x magnification and I expect it is probably a decent improvement over the +3 lenses previously available. Alex Mustard is the one who made this point - saying there are lots of subjects that could benefit from a small increase in magnification. While opportunities to use a 2x + lens are more limited. Of course this could vary depending on where you are diving. The MFO is certainly not an alternative to the SMC-1 lens.

Extension tubes have more effect on shorter focal lengths , I suspect it would reduce the minimum focus distance too much, it's already quite short on the 35mm lens.

First of all nice work, must be quite the task lining all this up with the water movement and the short working distances. I think most Ceratosoma sp. feed on sponges storing the toxins from their prey in glands. The shrimp I expect make use of "safe" transport as the nudis are left alone as they taste so bad. I expect there is no shortage of detritus around the the nudi and the shrimp happily feast on it as the nudi travels to new locations. They seem to be picking up little particles as they move about the nudi and the one underneath just taking advantage of what is stirred up.

I should add that I would think it would be worth at least trying it out in a pool or lake before travelling, what seems perfectly practical can end up causing unanticipated issues which may be difficult to fix in the field. For example I set my rig before I travelled to be near neutral and I had a 690 gr and a 210 gr float arm on each side. I found it took lots of torque to twist up and the solution was swapping out the 210 gr arms for standard arms and diving with it about 450gr negative. I'm going to try out a bottom float of about 400 grams on my next trip. Stills of course is a lot less demanding than video when it comes to trimming and I'm just trying for near neutrality without a lot of torque to aim up.

I think the big advantage of the 8-15 with 2x is it's versatility. it goes from a 175-180° full diagonal fisheye through to about a 28mm equivalent. I use the 8-15 with my OM-1 which gives the same range as available on FF with the 8-15 plus 2x. You would need to have a gear printed with the 2x but that should not be a major obstacle. It is effectively a 15mm fisheye, WWL-WACP with 28-60 and 14-28 lens in one package, albeit with some barrel distortion throughout the range. And it seems at least as sharp as the WACP/28-60 combination. My calculations suggest the WWL-WACP/28-60 combination has the about the reach of a 32mm lens at 60mm compared to the 28mm reach of the 8-15/2x which is pretty close and I suspect would be sufficient for most users. In fact I'm wondering if Nauticam could have perhaps worked with someone like Metabones to develop a custom 2x converter tuned to the 8-15 lens rather than developing the FCP port. It might avoid the limited depth of field the FCP seems to have at close focus. You could have a 1.5x model as well which could be used on APS-C and would also find application on full frame. All of this is possible due to the high optical quality of the Canon 8-15.

Good questions, It's hard to say till you try, the basics are relatively simple - the floats want to be on top and the housing/weights below and generally speaking keeping it symmetrical. In principle when trying to keep the whole thing neutral, I expect adding weight is probably easier than subtracting buoyancy. and ideally that weight could become your trim as well. The issue you may run into could be that float arms are more or less vertical while the float between the rail is horizontal so the distribution of buoyancy shifts when you tilt the rig. Same thing with your monitor - if it's behind the housing it's like an extension of the housing and can be balanced with sliding weights. If it's above as you tilt it over it's going to start pulling down. Perhaps you could mount a buoyancy block behind the monitor with the other block directly below it? In principle making the monitor also neutral would free up where you position it. Once you decide how to mount your monitor then you can think about where to place the buoyancy I think.