Chris Ross

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.

So you are saying you don't have enough arm to mount stix floats I assume? I've had good experience with the INON Mega float arms : https://underwater.com.au/shop/inon-mega-float-arms.html?srsltid=AfmBOor-N9Og_rOsVktINaj5kcBjeHfFdAxIgvWnuYQp-zD7ocxAZywL available in either 390 or 650 gram buoyancy, I've had mine quite a few years, they seem quite durable and price is not crazy. I also have a couple of Isotta float arms, basically an aluminium shell, they cost a little more, I have two of 670 gr arms for my wide angle setup, quite a bit cheaper than Nauticam but seem like they should be durable., about 40% cheaper than Nauticam. The Isotta are limited to 70mm dia so are quite long if you need a lot of buoyancy, the INON are big diameter and shorter. a long clamp between the two arms of each side to the M helps to get them to fold flat against each other.

Might be good light quality, but 1200 lumens seems a little weak, probably be OK with macro where you can get in really close. The thing with video lights is you are trying to add reds and yellows into the ambient light and this one will do that a little but will be over powered by the ambient light in shallow water. I see they have a 4000 lumen model which would probably do better - it's $549. Of course look for reviews, need to confirm that paying the extra $$$ will actually deliver good CRI. Don't know if you saw Blue water photo has a comparison table: https://www.bluewaterphotostore.com/best-underwater-video-lights/?srsltid=AfmBOopHlreMa-kGVb6def7NBCwtFGPY3ti-JcEd7TUrNuAfK3Cvptcn

I've looked on and off for websites covering contact degradation, but really can't find anything like the AI output above and I really can't find anything definitive about this. There are a great many Li-ion based items, around, I'm thinking of things like power tools, ultra bright spotlight torches etc and if this was common there would be something out there. These strobes draw a lot of power but they are really not pushing the envelope, things like Li-ion power tools - I looked up specs for a small saw from De walt, it uses and a 6 A-hr 18V battery rated to provide up to 800W of power, this is 44 amps at 18V. If the issues with terminal contacts is related to amps, you would expect to see it on something like this. and I couldn't find anything like this on power tools - and these are used in rather dirty environments. The fact of the matter is for electrochemical corrosion to occur you need moisture, you can get this if there are salts of some type on the contacts, fingerprints have a little salt, or you might be pushing traces of salt water in from water droplets on the o-ring if you don't dry it off. Certainly high currents can accelerate this type of corrosion but unless the contact is that bad you get arcing, clean terminals should not corrode. If they are corroding poor quality materials cant be ruled out, it is hard to judge quality just by looking, the quality and materials used in plating can vary significantly for example and choice of base metal can have an impact. Springs can also be too light and fatigue over time so contact pressure is reduced. A question was asked on the Retra maxi post and Oskar replied that Retra uses a multi layer plating on their contacts and claim not to have had issues unless they have flooded. As an aside, my company is in an "AI will be the key to success" phase and are busy exploring ways to use it. Talking to some people who have tried, they say it's great for writing reports, organizing facts, all sorts of language tasks, but it tends to suck at technical topics. They are language models working what words should be placed in what sequence based on all of the content they have ingested and the starter phrase provided. Very easy to mix things from different fields to write a load of rubbish, the Joule heating equation for example is rather garbled. The correct answer is that 0.01 ohms at 20A produces 4W of heat.

Thanks Chip, pleased we could help. Happy New year!

So I assume the trick is to have the housing in trim and close to neutral and just loosely hold to avoid transferring your movement to the housing. For trim a large acrylic dome for example will make the housing want to twist upwards and make life particularly difficult pointing anywhere other than it's natural position with the dome pointing up.

That should work pretty well as long as the lenses don't interfere too much with sight-lines

I was using it today, Vis was quite ordinary with plenty of particles, shooting a nudi about 80mm long, where I would usually think twice about attaching the MFO3, but getting in closer made a big difference in particles in the images. Focus is indeed quite snappy.

Perhaps, just have to try it out, the only concern you might have if it gets in the way of aiming, which becomes more of a problem as you increase magnification. Will that system restrict your strobe arm movement at all? I'm not sure exactly how it will work but sounds like you are connecting your two inner arms together with the 8 arm?

If you have trouble finding somewhere to mount a bayonet caddy - one solution is float arms in place of stix floats - they generally have a mounting point for a caddy I use the INON float arms, price is reasonable and i've been using them for many years. I used shorts for the MFO3 in Lembeh, it worked quite OK and I didn't attach it to tether in the pocket- but it's a big lump of glass and the elastic pocket held it tight particularly with bayonet adapter ring attached. It wasn't exactly easy to get in there, but I worked my way around it. Regarding the MFO1, I haven't heard it's a great improvement on m43, it's basically just a weak diopter. You could try leaving it on and stacking the UCL lens for more power. Stacking a CMC on an MFO1 is not recommended as both correct for the water interface, but there was some discussion you could do it with a third party diopter. You could add a flip to the MFO-1 perhaps, but it would be easy enough to try it first before buying more gear.

It is quite common to see vignetting like this in lenses for mirrorless cameras, the manufacturers will do this to produce a cheaper lens and correct the errors electronically. I found a review on line with an image both corrected and uncorrected and it appears what Canon has done is the lens uncorrected has a field of view a bit wider than 24mm and as the lens has a lot of barrel distortion which stretches the corners that they pull in to create a 24mm wide frame electronically. Doing this they avoid having to correct for the strong barrel distortion. ( of course I don't have the lens in hand and it's equally possible that the correction produces an image that's not as wide as a true 24mm lens - this would be a good project to compare the 24mm field (corrected) with that of an L lens like the 24-105) That aside a lot of reviews regard this lens as not the sharpest knife in the drawer so unfortunately FF Canon users are stuck with a wet optics lens that is less than ideal. The Nikon equivalent 24-50 is reportedly much sharper. Which brings up another point, that wet optics like the WWL can't improve a soft lens. One of the claims when the WWL first appeared was that domes degraded images enough that you could match the performance of a top line 16-35 lens in a large dome with the kit lens mated with a WWL. In some cases you could, but not all kit lenses are created equal and the RF 24-50 is a lot less equal than something like the EF 28-70 lens that can be mated with the WACP or the Sony 28-60. Having said that one or two reviews said the optics were OK - perhaps there is sample variability with these lenses or those reviews were not representative?? So the sad truth is that for Canon users who want to use wet wide optics - at least from Nauticam is that the 24-50/WWL-C combination provides flexibility but at the cost of less than stellar performance and it seems the WACP-C is a better option?

Hi Mike, welcome onboard!

However this site from Reef photo suggests it may not work for a YS-D1, see item 3) : Reef Photo & VideoTroubleshooting Strobes With Electrical SyncFew things can be more frustrating on a trip than when your usually reliable electrically triggered strobes suddenly stop working.Ikelite has a similar page for their strobes.

The Lumen ratings on cheap lights in aliexpress and similar sites are likely works of fiction. I have heard many say they all seem to come from the same factory, so not much to choose between them until you get into named brands and more $$$. The reason for warm light is that when colour balancing on the subject, the background water becomes a deeper blue, this is mainly used in strobes for still images. Strobes are way more powerful than lights and I would expect that you would struggle to get the same effect on video as the amount of artificial light is generally less than what you get with a strobe as you need to push the colour temperature further overall to get the same colour balance on the subject with less artificial light added.

Hello Julio, welcome to the forum, good to have you here. I pasted your text into Notepad, a plain text editor which strips formatting and copied and pasted back to forum - this allows the text to wrap. If you paste in text from external sources this can help to ensure it displays prperly on the forum.

I used the Pany 8mm plus Zen 100mm dome for a while before I went with the Canon 8-15, used it for most of the shots in these two galleries: https://www.aus-natural.com/Underwater/Rowley%20Shoals/index.html https://www.aus-natural.com/Underwater/Weda%20Resort%20Halmahera/index.html There are a couple of shots taken with the 12-40 in each gallery, I used it on the first day then switched to the fisheye for the rest of the images (95%+) . On Olympus bodies the Panasonic 8mm has some purple fringing in the corners, which is mostly correctable in RAW processing and it's not always noticeable. The Olympus 8mm is a little bit more expensive and uses an extension tube. Either option is very compact and convenient for travel. Here's a pic of the Zen dome with Pany 8mm and the Canon 8-15 (with Metabones) for size comparison. You can actually use the 8-15 with the Zen dome, but need the N120 version- the front element won't fit through the N85mount.

Exactly, it's a good solution for a great many people. I don't use it, but I've adapted a Canon 8-15 which is an excellent solution as well, even if it's a little expensive and heavy.

I leave the o-rings in place, but I dive locally and do single dives every few weeks as well as trips away. I think if I was only diving on trips once or twice a year I could see pulling to o-rings and storing them in zip-locks inside the housings, but If I'm diving regularly, they just stay in the housing and get checked as required. I don't see much point in putting old o-rings in place - you may get contaminants in the groove, but you need to check the groove before installing the o-ring regardless and you have to keep track of which o-ring is the old one. For travel they also stay in place, the port is detached so the housing is not sealed and a cap goes over the port/o-ring for travel and this protects it well enough.

Voltages are not that different, nominal 3.6V per cell, so 7.2V total with two cells, four 1.2V cells gives 4.8V, if using a Retra with 8 cells it's 9.6V nominal. What counts is the voltage of all of the batteries in series. The voltage in isolation doesn't give the whole story as it is the current produced which is related to circuit resistance and voltage that sets the energy being transmitted. I don't know exactly what is going on here, 20A is a high current load for a battery , but for example a normal 220-240V power point can handle 15 amps of AC current without any problem. I know DC is different, but for contacts the main issue is arcing when disconnecting. You don't get power plugs being destroyed and they are handling a lot more power and video lights with bigger contacts don't seem to have the issue.

Note that S&S strobes used to be notorious for having low sensitivity on their optical trigger and were quite sensitive to fibre optic cable quality. You can bypass this by using an infra-red remote control. Just point the remote's LED directly into the fibre optic port on the strobe and press any of the buttons. the infra red signals will trigger strobes quite easily. A remote for a TV, DVD player, aircon unit etc is fine as long as it has an LED you point at the device.

I'd get the EM-5 III over the EM-10V model, the feature list on the 10 series is a lot more limited, things like custom settings on te top dial is missing - you can save all your UW settings and call it up on the top dial, AF is better with the Em-5 III as well. Downsides to the AOI housing include no rear eyepiece, so you can only use the rear screen and if I recall correctly limitations on flash sync speed with the built in trigger. There was a thread on that recently, believe in RC mode the sync limit is 1/160 for EM10IV and manual limited to 1/200. An EM-1 MKII is also a great option if you can pickup a second hand Nauticam housing. The EM-1 II has 3 custom settings on the dial you can recall. Regarding lenses used, the question is what he wants to shoot. Macro - the 60mm macro is the go-to lens. Wide angle there are a few options to look at, the 14-42 by all accounts is sharp at the widest, but a bit soft when zoomed right in. Can't comment on the AOI wet lens, but a review on almost any camera would have some relevance. A lot of people seem happy with a 14-42 with a WWL or a Panasonic 12-35 with WWL-C. There was a Nauticam EM1-II on the classifieds for a great price recently. Other wide options include a 12-45 in the Zen 170mm dome, the 8mm fisheye in the Zen 100mm dome or something like the 8-18 or 8-15 or 7-14 lenses but they require an N120 adapter and N120 Zen dome. The rectilinears are easier to deal with in Isotta as they have a 102mm port system rather than the 85mm port system and you don't need to get into the expensive N85-N120 adapters. Be easier to suggest something knowing what the preferred subjects are.

Yes these are the people without mechanical sympathy, they'll probably find some other way to flood their strobes even if they stop servicing them, it's a skill UW photographers need to learn and avoiding ultimately won't solve the issue. It's very dependent on the situation whether you need to pull them, but if you see water droplets that needs to be dealt with.

I think the lights have lower current, a 100 W-hr battery if it lasts 1 hour at full power it's running at 100W and I believe they are 14.4V, so running 7 amps. Some newer ones have higher power of course, but typically aren't run at full power for long periods. The backscatter flashes talk about 20Amp current drain. The contact area on the RG Blue battery is also a lot bigger. As the video light is constant draw, it probably needs the bigger contact area to minimise resistance and heat build up.