Chris Ross

A handheld rocket blower also works quite well for blowing off excess water: https://www.camerapro.com.au/4980-giottos-large-rocket-air-blower.html

Subal make flash housings for Nikon and Canon. http://www.subal.com/c5c17/Light_Flash/Flash_Housings.aspx I think one of the issues with land flashes is that while they come labelled with impressive guide numbers like 58 or 60 this is fully zoomed in. My Canon 580EXII has a headline guide number of 58 but at 14mm lens coverage the guide number if 15. Zooming into 24mm coverage it is 24 GN which is about the guide number of a Z-240 but with less angular coverage (84° vs 100° without diffuser for INON Z-240). Of course all of this assumes supplied GN are somewhat accurate.

I have used the combination on land - I don't have the port for it to try UW. AF is slightly slower but works fine mostly and image quality seems fine. I shoot at f11 usually. I probably have some reasonable on land samples I could share. I think I recall 1 or 2 WP people mentioning they shoot with it UW, perhaps they will chime in. Here is a sample with the 2.0x: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wetpixeluw/posts/10158868336166017 Some people using the lens on this WP post: https://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?/topic/70464-om-system-90mm-macro-announced/page/4/

This has been discussed before. The Nauticams are great to use but very complex inside so you would need to be very sure of yourself and meticulous. Other housings are much simpler with an array of straight buttons with minimal offsets so it is easier to disassemble and put back together. You need to source a service kit for all of the o-rings and may need to replace corroded shafts and other parts. You should use new springs and e-clips as well. I have seen a number of reports that Nauticam service is expensive but your housing comes back looking like new. As others have said does it need service? My EM-1 MkII housing is still working fine and is 7 years and near 300 dives old. I soak mine and exercise the buttons after every session and dry throughly - I don't let water evaporate on the surface - this avoids water marks. Soaking an exercising buttons is needed to flush salt water out - it won't leave of it's own accord. If salt water is left it will eventually evaporate and become very concentrated and corrosive.

If it's 74° diagonal at 60mm it's very close to an equisolid fisheye projection. This is apparently the projection used on the Panasonic m43 8mm fisheye and the Nikkor 10.5 mm and also the Canon, Nikon, Sony and Sigma 15/16mm fisheye lenses. so should be very close to the look of many fisheye lenses at it's widest setting..

The big one I recall from many posts I've seen is that the Sony 90mm macro AF is so much better on the latest bodies, quicker and less hunting.

One thing to consider is that DOF is not evenly distributed and you have 1/3 is in front of focus point and 2/3 behind more or less. If you are a little short of depth of field focusing on something closer in the frame tends to make the best use of what you have. The problem with DOF calculators is that you are focusing on a virtual image when underwater and if you were in a dome you could calculate the distances to the virtual image, I'm not sure that would work with the WWL. You should probably find that that using an 11mm lens should give about the right result in the calculator as it gets the magnification in the right ball park so the depth of field should be close to right. This shows that focusing on something 1m away at f8 is sharp from 0.5m away from sensor to infinity. The calculations show though that it is very sensitive to getting the focus distance right. At f8 focusing at 0.95m gets 0.49m to 13.8 in focus. focusing at 1.02m gets 0.5 to infinity in focus. At F5.6 it is closer to focusing at 1.5m away to get 0.7m to infinity in focus.

I must say I agree, it is no doubt possible to make good looking go-pro footage but there is an endless supply shakey, jittery poorly lit clips with no apparent point to them and which are way too long floating about on the internet. There is a fundamental problem of course with bigger sensors, the tiny sensors have a lot of depth of field even with fast lenses. As the lenses get bigger magnification on chip increases and minimum focus distance grows and probably also runs into limitations if you use a dome port with actually focusing on the virtual image. So some type of focusing becomes essential, it might even be as simple as a near and far dial and you switch to close focusing for UW behind a dome.

They have moving parts but they really don't impact the seals. Nauticam ports push straight in without the need to rotate, while the original extensions are press in and turn, the locking mechanism is internal to prevent it rotating back, it is activated by a locking lever no different in concept to a ZOOM gear control or the control to move one of the dials on your camera. Some extensions such as the N85-N120 adapter have a push and turn system which is no different to buttons on the housing or controls that you turn and would probably be serviced on a similar frequency to the housing itself as the mechanisms are quite similar. It's really no different to extra controls on your housing. The new Type II extension rings have the same internal locking ring as the housing itself and it appears to be an identical mechanism to activate and turn the locking ring, so again same maintenance requirement as the housing. The type II extension rings don't need to rotate after being pressed into place (except I think the 10mm ring). My EM-1 MkII housing is now 7 years old and has not been serviced and still working well. The downside is the internal controls are quite complex so after a few or many years you might send the housing in for refurbishment which involves a complete strip down. They are reported to come back looking like new.

I always google around for reviews before I buy from a new supplier I googled and found MPB seems to have a terrible reviews record. Always worth spending a few minutes reading some reviews.

Nudibranch & Sea Slug Identification Indo-Pacific (Gosliner, Valdes & Behrens) NSSI for short. Reef Creature Identification Tropical Pacific (Humann / DeLoach) Guide to the Sea Fishes of Australia (Kuiter) Should the thread title perhaps be "Fish & all other Marine creatures ID books"

If you are free diving, then you might appreciate a more compact package, something like INON UWL-H100, though I think it's now replaced by the UWL95 which seems to have the equivalent field of a 20mm lens. You can add a dome unit to it for a much wider view.

The Seafrogs lens only gets you back to the land view for the RX100 lens, which in underwater terms is not that wide. The weefine lens if you look at their webpage is designed for a small sensor camera like a TG6, so may not work so well on the 1"sensor of the RX100. This page may be helpful with a lot of sample shots taken with wet lenses. https://www.housingcamera.com/blog/product-reviews/the-ultimate-wet-lens-sample-post It mentions cameras used and the settings can be found in the EXIF data of the images. Before you decide if you need a wide lens perhaps you'd like to think about what you are planning to photograph and where you are planning to dive. Some sites you may be better using a macro close up lens.

Not surprising that you are blowing out at ISO 5K. ND filters are very straight forward - as long as they are reasonably neutral they should only reduce the flash exposure by the rated number of stops.

No doubt the tech has its limits - all I'm saying the only way to really find that limit is with experience. You obviously haven't met some of our small birds over here. You follow them with focus tracking till they strike a pose. Many don't readily perch out on a stick for you. If you are following them through the lens they are less likely to spook from the sudden movement of lifting the lens to shooting position. I agree though shadows underwater are way darker. As for why you would want to shoot in such situations the biggest one would be identification, I can ID a great many Australian birds but a photo helps a great deal with some I'm not so familiar with or recording a rarity for survey work. Fish are much harder to ID in my experience and having a photo can help a great deal for some species that can be ID'd from a photo.

I would venture that diving in 5-6°C water with a 7mm conventional neoprene wetsuit is extremely optimistic. I'm one of the more cold tolerant divers around Sydney and 14° is about my limit diving wet. On boats where there is any wind you will continue to lose heat from the wind chill from water on the suit outer surface. Mid last year I was on a boat in 16 deg water in my drysuit (compressed neoprene) with light thermals underneath it didn't feel that much more comfortable than diving in my 7mm wetsuit, where i really noticed it was on the boat, people diving wet were shivering and I was 100% comfortable. I believe the open cells suits also shed water quickly. I think freedivers around Sydney often dive in 3mm open cell suits in 14-17°C water.

I only have experience with the OM-1 it does pretty well on birds in foliage and twigs but it does have a threshold beyond which it won't pick out the subject. If it can grab the eye it seems to follow the subject reasonably well as long as it can still see the eye - but lose too much of the subject and you are toast. It's still worth trying things out if only to find what it can't cope with and when to quit and find a new subject.

Welcome aboard Isaac, good to see you here.

If you could obtain a blank plug it should be possible. Ask your dealer if one is available.

It could be something as simple as the older cameras not providing as much power to the lens or that the early mirrorless AF systems were just not up to the task, even though the focus motor in the 90mm was. My experience with AF/MF is on Canon and Olympus, Canon switches between the two seamlessly and the big teles have full time MF. On olympus they provide a clutch on some lenses pull it back for MF, there the focus changes to whatever the lens barrel is rotated to and them when clicking back to AF it maintains focus.

I mostly dive in Sydney has some great diving, I've dived some of those locations you mention but not all.

Thanks Massimo From a literal English perspective the design of the WWL and the various WACP models are different - one is wet mounted others are dry mounted and the lens element sizes are different they are design specs that vary between related models. Try telling someone his hugely expensive WACP-1 is the same design as the WWL. It's been established that WWL-1 and WACP-C are quite similar in performance while the WACP-1 is a step up. Sure many use the same lens layout, the same thing happens with camera lenses. Some people like to dig deep into the technical comparisons. Personally I find all this interesting but am more concerned about how they perform in practice and don't really think it would change which option I chose, it would more likely be set by how much I'm prepared to spend. However the point of engaging with you is not so much to deal with the facts but more so how the message is delivered. Like it or not, blunt answers upset people unnecessarily and could easily be delivered as constructive criticism with a little thought.

Sorry Massimo, please elaborate on "the fact that it says the design is different while it is not is a material error" I just don't follow that, which design is the same? WACP and WWL? WACP-1 and WACP-C?

Massimo - sorry-no, there is a right and a wrong way of getting your point across and you are doing it wrong. Explain what you believe the error is and provide facts to back it up. Frankly your points while they may be factual are not really relevant to any trying to choose one of these water contact optics and are an omission rather than an error, as is the the fact that only Sony can use everything on the list, people will soon find this out from the port charts as you mention.

A key variable is how well the macro port fits the lens. Nauticam ports are very good in this regard. Some other brands are not as good and the lens sits back a bit from the glass. Doesn't impact shooting with a macro lens but can be a problem with wet optics. Also as far as I am aware the EMWL components connect via the Nauticam bayonet system. The Bayonet adapter can screw onto a and M67 port but the port needs to be suitable. If the flange around the m67 thread is too wide it can't be screwed on. See the photo in this post: https://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?/topic/68595-wwl-1b-on-seafrogs-housing/&tab=comments#comment-433827