Chris Ross

Not an easy choice, there's trade offs a-plenty in APS_C. Canon allows good WB, probably good AF with the old EF-S 60mm macro on their adapter, the 18-45 lens is also listed with the WWL. Sony allows you to use the WWL with the 28-60 which is a good solution by all accounts - the Zeiss 50mm seems to work well with the A1 - but how is it with the A6700? As I recall the 90mm was regarded as a bit slow until the A1 came along so AF seems to be a bit body dependent. On housings I see Marelux now has an R7 housing with an A6700 coming soon. If you were looking at photos I'd be suggesting m43 as a good option plenty of lenses to choose from there, but for video OM system doesn't have the reputation that Panasonic does and AF might be lacking with the Panasonic bodies for macro. If the OM-1 were good enough in video the 30mm Panasonic lens is very snappy AF and a wide choice of rectilinear wides available.

I think this is probably the real key to whether you should go for a rebreather - there are some people who just shouldn't consider them. For myself I'm fairly meticulous and if ever I've had UW issues come up I've coped quite well, but I'm not sure I'd trust myself to be as meticulous as I need to be all the time. I can 100% see the advantages but for 90+% of the diving I do I wouldn't be taking advantage of the long dive times and depth capability.

Hi Val, welcome onboard, good to have you here and hope you find the site useful. Probably best to ask the tech questions in the video forum, not everyone looks through the intro forum.

I can see why they are recommending it - seems mostly around space due to big file sizes and relatively small SSD internal drives from the reading. I do keep forgetting that you are quite constrained with a laptop, I do all my serious editing on a desktop and you can readily install a 4 or 8 TB SSD internally which you could edit from.

Again the interface speed is much faster in general than what is connected to it. I don't know what the price difference between the various models is but it always used to be the very top model was a sizable premium over a mid range one with a real world benefit that was rather small. Looking at those benchmarks if I'm reading them correctly, I'd be seriously looking at 3rd column 16C/40C model if could be had a decent discount, the last column M4 16C/40C model seems faster but not that much faster, and processing time seems connected to GPU cores for video rendering. Unless of course you see a pair of 8K monitors in your near future.😂

I'm not sure I understand what the issue with this machine is, but it sounds to me like a workaround rather than something you'd want to adopt regardless on a more capable machine.

Whether this is actually faster depends on the drive read/write speed rather than the bus speed. The T7 SSD will read/write at around 0.5- 1 GB/sec according to specs I found. Typically the internal NVMe SSD is faster at 2-3 GB/sec, the M3 is rated at 2.8 GB/sec. Whether this translates into a faster experience on one or the other depends on a number of factors, mostly around overhead that the bus and processor are handling. The Thunderbolt interface is very fast but typically it's not the limit.

I think for still images, these days it's not a very demanding task unless you are focus stacking or sometime like that with multiple images. Otherwise fast storage helps load big files faster. So the biggest gains would be in video rendering. I don't now if your current Macbook is portable size, but if I was considering it, I'd be inclined to go for a desktop and relegate the laptop to travel support.

Not the best view for ID, but it looks like a triplefin, perhaps the Highhat triplefin - Enneapterygius tutuliae

Yes I know, but the 787 needs it batteries to fly and banning phones or laptops would create a huge uproar. Hopefully it never happens but never under estimate what might come about from a knee jerk reaction.

It's not the strobe batteries I'm concerned about almost certainly it will be some other battery, just due to the numbers around. Yes they have equipment to deal with it, but if we get a bad incident that is not well handled there always the possibility of a knee jerk reaction which makes flying with Li-ion more difficult.

The Tokina can't be used as it's screw drive lens, but I believe the 8-15 is fine and AFs well on the FTZ adapter. Might be the old 16mm fisheye, that is also screw drive you are thinking of that doesn't work on Z cameras.

The huge rain event in Spain was also related to warm seas. The seas off the east coast of Australia are getting warmer too and this is behind all the floods and wet summers we have been having.

I have to agree, I can do 3-4 dives on my INON Z-240s - admittedly its shooting m43, so mostly f8 so not as demanding, but they do the job. I don't need a strobe to have a video quality light so that's not important for me. Dealing with 16 batteries is obviously time consuming but totally manageable. There's certainly applications where you want more power, but not for everyone. I agree there's different qualities in batteries, especially worrying is the cheap Li-ion, people will buy them from the cheapest online source they can find. all it will take is one bad incident with a cheap Li-ion to make air travel more difficult.

Sony hotshoe contacts are known to be finicky - examine them closely to make sure they are all straight.

A myth, it may charge slightly slower but the flash light output remains as it is - set by the capacity of the capacitor. If it's doing what you want I see no reason to change batteries. It is quite possible the capacitor on the strobe degrades over time however. But checking it you would need to compare known flash power images against each other. Are you still using the same ISO and aperture as previous? Are you shooting different subjects which require you to be further away? Are you more diligent about getting the strobe power right in camera and not relying on boosting brightness in post processing? All these thing can of course impact and strobe power relies on your memory as it's not in the EXIF. I'm not 100% sure I can recall what strobe power I used in shots taken a few years back🤷‍♂️.

It's also a big lens which you would have fit from the front of the housing with the N85 port system I would expect, probably need an expensive N85-N120 adapter and N120 dome as well.

I would hope ISO3200 would be perfectly usable on a full frame Sony, as long as it's well exposed, I've shot in rainforests using much older equipment at ISO 3200 (the old 1D MkIV ) and as long as I didn't pull the shadows up too much results were quite good. Stretching out you shutter speed should also help, limited by subject movement rather than the diver. This image was shot at 1/100 f7.1 ISO3200 on the 1D mKIV and is cropped a bit: https://www.aus-natural.com/Ecuador/Hummingbirds/slides/Gorgeted Sun Angel.html Underwater the even expanse of dark water is more prone to noticable noise but also easier to process it out. The Sony A7RV should be at least two stops better on noise.

It's not that you can't shoot the 16-35 wide, more if you would want to. Well if you are shooting wide open the 16-35 has an advantage for sure, but a rectilinear in a dome has major edge issues at f2.8, so it depends if there's anything important there. If you were happy with 16-35 at f2.8 then the WWL combo at f4 should be a little better on the edges. But basically means with the WWL you would need to shoot 1 stop higher ISO or one stop slower shutter speed compared to the 16-35. You didn't say what ISO you were shooting, if you believe DXOmark, the noise performance of the RII and RV are very close, the RV has an edge in dynamic range but only at low ISO and the two cameras are quite close beyond ISO1600. Noise should all be in the dark water (mostly) so processing to clean that up selectively should be possible.

The WWL has slightly wider coverage compared to a 16-35, something like the same horizontal field as a 14mm rectilinear, but the advantage for low light is you don't need to stop down as much with the WWL where you should be able to shoot at f5.6 or so. I imagine corners will be dark water though - what f-stop did you use with the 16-35 previously?

It will want to float with the LH handle (with both floats) upwards, but there's not much buoyancy in 4 stix floats. 4 large floats is +320gr while the strobe is -150gr. So with 2 on one side it's +170 gr on the left. In the configuration with two floats on each side it's -150+160 = 10gr positive. while the RHS is +160gr a difference of 150 gr more bouyancy on the RH than the LH side. So the unbalance from side to side is very close in both configurations, a difference of 20 grams. On the balls perhaps change all the o-rings to be the same type if they are not already. I would also add that the float each side configuration might need something to keep th floats from floating off the bare of the arm, it's only a push fit as shown in the photo. on a single strobe, should be fine for macro, but probably will struggle for wide angle shots with the mini strobe. Two of them is probably just adequate for WA

The image will either be sRGB or Adobe RGB, whether you want to use one or the other as I said is down to how the images will be used. If you are using the Lightroom, you can keep the Master image in AdobeRGB and export in sRGB, once you have produced an sRGB image there's no going back on that file. I also don't believe you need to have two different calibrations for your monitors, a monitor calibrated in AdobeRGB will render an sRGB image just fine, it just doesn't use all the colour space it is capable of. If you want to work in sRGB to avoid the change when the image is converted just start your processing in sRGB. I think it's approaching the time when publishing in Adobe RGB will work for many people. If you entering competitions then I would certainly want to work in AdobeRGB and also if ever you were printing on a high end inkjet printer, their colour gamut is certainly bigger than sRGB and you would be missing out on those extra colours. When you are working in lightroom, the raw image doesn't have a colour space and tell it what colour space to use when you start the processing. You can then process and export the image and the conversion to sRGB can be done then. I use Photoshop which is a little different so I keep a full resolution Adobe RGB master and make a web version in sRGB.

The basic problem with sRGB is that is a smaller colour space than others available, it was built around what CRT monitors could do at the time. The problem I see regularly when processing and converting to sRGB to produce a web version is that the blues in reef shots go off. You can remedy this a bit using the selective colour tool in photoshop adding a lot of cyan to the blues and playing with magenta in cyans and blues but it's not perfect. Don't know if LR has a similar tool. The reason for converting to sRGB is solely due to the default behaviour of browsers when serving the image - if colour management is not enabled they assume the image is sRGB and if you post for example an Adobe RGB image if does weird things to the colours. I'm not sure what the current situation with browsers is, a few years ago it was a bit of a mess, I think most browsers are now colour managed, but necessarily on by default. what to do? depends on what you are doing with your images! If posting to Facebook, to some extent it doesn't matter as FB strips profiles and re-processes the image to it's own profile(saves a few kB of storage - a lot spread over millions of images). Instagram probably does something similar. You could save in adobe RGB and I think nowadays Chrome, Edge and Firefox and possibly Safari will render that correctly. Adobe RGB is a good choice I think as a great many monitors can display that these days. Going on percentages I would guess 95% of people will see a correctly rendered image on their setup these days if it's in Adobe RGB (ignoring the gamut their monitor is capable of) . There would not be many people on older versions as Windows forces updates on most people and Edge updates along with it. Plus among non-photographers most probably won't notice the colours being off a bit.

If the Tokina 10-17 is working for you it won't transfer across to the new Nikon mirrorless bodies and you would be looking at either a WWL option or 8-15 fisheye to replace it - but you don't get the full fisheye view with the WWL and I have seen the opinion expressed on here that the WWL is not a substitute for for fisheye for reef scenics. You could use the Nikon 8-15, but that's only a full frame fisheye at 15mm, you could add a 1.4x and use the lens between about 15mm and 21mm equivalent focal length , but it won't have the reach of the 17mm end of the the 10-17 which gets to 25.5 mm FF equivalent. All this will work behind either the Nauticam 140mm dome or the Zen 100mm dome, with the Nauticam having slightly better corners. I don't know if you plan to get a new Nauticam housing or look second hand for the Z6? You could save some money and get a physically smaller housing with Isotta. I know a local Sydney photographer who went with Isotta for a Z6 for this reason, the housing is significantly smaller. You can use your Nauticam ports on Isotta housings by changing the lug ring. For the fisheye I don't think the Zen dome is an option as it doesn't have a removable lug ring if I recall correctly, but Isotta offer a 4.5"crystal dome. If you want to emulate the 10-17 the only budget way to do it is with a DX - aPS-C body and currently with Nikon that would mean a Z50 and Isotta don't have a housing and a Nauticam one is a fairly pricey. A d500 is a fine camera still and a possibility or you could go to smaller formats - I'm more than happy with my OM-1 housing and the image quality is a close match for the d500 sensor - you could adapt a Canon 8-15 to it or use the straight fisheye and add mid range zoom if needed.

Edward stated that their engineers are working on measuring data with various camera lenses and it will be uploaded soon. I would think this data will appear in the port charts, by the time the new lens is released and give a very good idea on what to expect for individual lenses. Reduced hunting would certainly be welcome.