Chris Ross

Theoretically, but practically the setpoint is equivalent to about 2m depth and the efficiency of the hand pumps is pretty low so I don't think you can get too much lower is pressure.

Yes, but there is inward pressure on all of the buttons underwater and if one of the clearances is a bit tight it might be enough to activate a button. The fact it worked again in the housing before re-opening it tends to indicate a problem caused by external pressure and you said you had replaced the trigger once, which tends to indicate a problem somewhere other than the trigger. It also possible that the camera is not sitting on the camera plate right and you may sometimes have the camera sitting a little further back. You could try to test it by setting the camera up in the housing and taking shots with each of the buttons on back of the camera pressed in turn and checking to see if the trigger fires each time. This might identify a button to check further. The fact it happens so occasionally is of course going to make finding the cause difficult.

I dived out at Catalina island on a boat organised by Bluewater photo a few years back. As I was flying in, I asked about tanks and weights and it seemed like it was a difficult problem to hire them and they ended up organising one of their staff loan me a tank and weights. That may be because I was dealing with Bluewater rather than a dive shop? The boat I was on did tank fills (incl nitrox) on the boat. The boats seem to go out of San Pedro near Long Beach. The boats are separate operations to the dive shops. I expect if you emailed one of the dive shops in this area they could help you out with what you need to hire and booking onto a boat. On the boat I was on I needed cash to pay for Nitrox (and tips for the crew). If I recall correctly the boat trip included air fills and breakfast/lunch. This shop is closeby to the San Pedro harbour and has trips out to Catalina on its schedule: https://pacificwilderness.com/?page_id=521 I've not used them but they are close to where the boats leave from. I went in August and was lucky to have really nice conditions water varied from 20°C at some sites to 16°C at another.

So when it quits is it out the whole dive? Or does it come back again? Does surfacing fix it, or do you have to open the case? I'm guessing on each occasion it failed that you tested it on the surface first and it stopped when you submerged? My initial thought is perhaps the housing is marginally pressing a button which prevents the flash firing. I would think that it has nothing to do with water - just the pressure. Either that or it is random and you use it underwater much more often than on dry land?

Unfortunately the short working distance means that a wet lens won't help you out. Closeup diopters work by allowing you to focus closer than the lens already focuses so you are losing working distance. You can calculate working distance at min focus from the specifications and the bare lens has about 12mm or working distance at 1:1 - when you add in a port 1:1 is about touching the port glass. Best you can do is get a close fitting port for the lens.

You probably won't find anything at the price of the FM7 in Singapore. It's quite an expensive place. I travel there quite a bit for work but the hotels I use would probably be a bit too pricey for what you want. Likewise food can be expensive, but the hawker centres and food courts can provide great food at reasonable prices even in the tourist areas. You can be in downtown SIngapore in your hotel within a little over an hour from landing and a taxi to Orchard road is around $S30 or so and getting around when you are there via MRT is quite easy. Just be aware there are some taxis that don't take credit cards - the guy at the taxi queue will ask you. You probably don't want to take the MRT from the airport if you have a lot of luggage, they can get quite crowded.

Good to have you here Pavel. welcome onboard.

Welcome aboard Chris, good to have you here.

welcome aboard!

A little bit apples and oranges comparing the 15-30 (f4.5-6.3 IS STM) to other options you mention. It's in the port chart as an option for an APS-C sensor where it gives the full expected range between 18 and 30mm focal length. It's not on the port chart for full frame, but guess that it would work on Full frame but between 28 and 30mm only.

You should be able to avoid this tax when travelling domestically assuming the airport is setup with a domestic arrivals channel where you don't fill out a customs form and don't pass through customs. It's not clear from the airport terminal maps how this works for domestic arrivals as it mentions some international flights arrive at SJD terminal 1 and the map shows customs areas. It seems to me to be a somewhat legitimate tax, but the rules to apply it are being bent, for example classifying a housing as a camera. The arrival card mentions you can bring in two cameras. Then there is also stuff about higher value items on the arrivals card. In theory most countries could apply this to incoming tourists as the vast majority are arriving with goods such as laptops, devices etc that would exceed the duty free import allowance, but they also depart the country with those goods. It is most likely a local official making a name for himself or funding an early retirement scheme. Certainly if you are coming back to your home country with brand new equipment to your home country you would be charged local taxes and duties. If you do get charged taxes on your housing in Mexico you should request that they provide a receipt and include serial numbers as it can only be legitimately be charged once. The other option which might be worthwhile if travelling with particularly valuable equipment is a carnet.

The first question is how well do your ports fit your macro lens? Does the lens come up to within a few mm of the port glass or sit further back? Then how close it is the accessory lens to the port glass? Testing the lenses by screwing them in a good suggestion and this will test if the flip adapter is an issue or not. But you also need to check if the distance inside the port is OK. The other consideration is does the adapter hold the lens parallel to the port? The saga adapters only have a hinge, while the Nauticam adapter has a locking clip to hold the parts together. I seem to recall this being an issue with flip adapters not folding completely flat in the past. The Kraken is a big lump and I suspect you need quiet a sturdy adapter to hold it properly.

The problem is the strobes over powering ambient light and if you put a filter on the lens it reduces both ambient and flash light and you need to boost ISO for ambient and you end up back where you started. Macro is entirely different as you are generally using flash as main light. According to the specs the Z330 ND is 4 stops - so hopefully that is enough for the task.

Welcome onboard Stuart, good to see you here

I found this link for the Godox you mention, seems like the coverage is not great: https://strobist.blogspot.com/2019/04/godox-ad200-amazing-flash-if-you-tweak.html Fixed using the bare bulb reflector system, but housing that would end up being a huge lump. It's been discussed on WP about dome covers probably not actually improving lighting cover. You want to see what sort of coverage it produced in testing. Getting a 100 deg beam would a reasonable target. Possibly it won't be Retra in its light quality??

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.