Chris Ross

Hi Al, welcome to another Sydney-sider!

What camera?, I recall having an issue with my EM-5 MkII a while back. It had a component they replaced to fix it. I looked it up and it was a frame contact mount unit that was faulty. It is needed to tell the camera a lens is attached. It was back in 2017 so exact details are vague, but it sounds similar to what you report.

The steps divesite where I took this is basically my local divesite and is arguably one of the best spots to find these animals. So if you get to Australia let me know, I'm sure I could find you one - Weather and swells permitting of course!

For full frame cameras it allows zoom between full frame fisheye(180° diagonal) and something approaching a 24-28mm rectilinear lens across the horizontal axis - depending on what lens you use it with. Previously you could only get this on APS-C with the tokina 10-17 and with m43 with an adapted 8-15mm lens. This is otherwise something you can't achieve that on full frame and is a very useful range for wide angle shots covering reef scenics and CFWA plus some chance of zooming in for sharks and pelagics which are too distant to shoot with the 180° diagonal fisheye.

I actually priced out an Isotta setup for a 60mm macro and 8mm fisheye in UK and the prices seemed quite good. An EM-1 III would also work very well, I've had the EM-1 II for a long time and just started taking the OM-1 UW. The main upgrade is faster AF and drive rate which is great for land based focus stacking but not so applicable UW. So It's not a great difference going with an EM-1 III if you can get it at a good price. I only went UW with the OM-1 as I had a intermittent issue with the EM-1 II and rather than sourcing another EM-1 II I got the housing for the OM-1 I already have. I would guess if you are on a budget you would try to get a single dome for wide angle, or with the Canon 8-15 or Tokina 10-17 you could get a fisheye all the way through to about 26mm full frame equivalent (for the 8-15) in one lens/dome so it would be like combining a fisheye with a 7-14 lens, only difference being the barrel distortion which reduces quite a bit as you zoom in. But it could all be used behind the Isotta 4 1/2"dome. The trade off being buying a Metabones adapter.

One question we didn't ask is which strobes you use, strobe power also scales with aperture as you generally need to stop down more with larger sensors. F8 is perfectly adequate on m43 while you are looking at f11-13 for APS-C. Shooting macro with the TG-6 doesn't need so much strobe power as you are so much closer and the lens is faster as well.

The Weedy Sea Dragon is one of the iconic species on divesites in SE Australia, they are quite big animals, around 350-400mm long or so and are really a bit too big for my Oly 60mm macro lens, I was about 1m back for this shot, which is a lot if the visibility is not great. So this is more of a snapshot, taken with quite low strobe power and a bit of cloning of backscatter. This one is a male carrying quite fresh eggs, it was just hanging in a clearing between kelp stands.

No Problem, I have the App - Fishes of the east Pacific which seems quite good, it's free. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fishes-east-pacific/id494644648

There's lots of different barnacle blennies, this is possibly a Panamic barnacle blenny.

I'm not sure I'd want to travel with a 250mm dome. You could also look perhaps at the 8 1/2" acrylic dome from Nauticam, it's a step up from the 170mm dome. You could also consider one of the Sea and Sea domes and just change the lug ring over to Nauticam. They have a 210mm acrylic and a 200mm glass dome you could look into. How much of an improvement you see with a bigger dome is most likely going to depend on the lens in question, the Sony rectiliear wides seem to perform quite well in smaller domes, though the 12-24 might be stretching the friendship anything smaller than a 230mm dome. https://www.seaandsea.com/ If you click on the instructions they include a procedure to change dome to a Nauticam mount. on the question of fisheye I would expect minimal improvement with a bigger dome once a certain minimum size is passed and placing it a little too close to the glass may indeed lose a little field of view, but there are plenty of people using fisheyes with the entrance pupil closer than optimal point. A prime example is the ikelite dome port for CFWA, the factory recommended setup has the entrance pupil well forward of the centre of curvature. They certainly seem less sensitive to the problem. This link shows some shots with a Nikon 8-15 and the ikelite CFWA port: https://www.ikelite.com/blogs/reviews/nikon-8-15mm-fisheye-compact-8-inch-dome-underwater-photos

Read the fine print closely for the ikelite housing you are thinking of, the choice of ports is sometimes limited for example the only way to use zoom on a number of the compact models is with a 6"dome which has the zoom control on the dome extension. So on these housings you can't use zoom with an 8"dome for example and there is no 4"dome option. This applies to the Canon R7 for example. On housing options have a look also at Isotta. many of their mirrorless housings are very compact. Spreadsheets are certainly the way to go pick a lens from each category and see what options there are to house it in each brand. Also look over the classifieds her and on WP to see if there are any ports on offer.

$5000 is not a lot in UW terms, depending somewhat upon which housing you want. I think the first suggestion is start with your subject and work backwards to the camera and finally the housing. The thing to remember is that costs and size scale with sensor format, you can generally use smaller domes with m43 and APS-C. The thing with APS_C is you often end up using fullframe sized and priced lenses, while m43 lenses are mostly significantly smaller and also cheaper. On Macro the Olympus 60mm macro is $399 while the Sony 90mm is $998 and Canon EF/RF 100mm around the same price. (New $USD price at BHPhoto) For wide angle an Olympus 8mm fisheye is $899 while a Canon 8-15 is $1249. In rectilinear the Canon APS-C offerings are a little slim with a 10-18 offered while you can get an 8-25 which is more versatile (16-28mm vs 16-50mm full frame equivalent). Uniquely m43 allows you to use the Canon 8-15 on an adapter which is a full frame fisheye to approximately a 28mm full frame field of view on horizontal axis with superb image quality. Not available at all on full full frame, though the tokina can do similar on APS_C. For travel I can fit my Olympus EM-1mkII system in a carry on size backpack with Zen 170mm dome, 100mm fisheye dome, macro port and two INON strobes, along with fisheye, macro and rectilinear wide lens, spare batteries and bits and pieces at a reasonable weight point. I would suggest scoping out a few system and entering them in a spreadsheet with new costs initially and consider that a used system probably goes for 50% or a little less than purchased new. Then start looking at what second hand cameras go for on Ebay for example. Here's a post showing an olympus 60mm macro next to a Canon EF 100 macro: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4595033 The Canon lens gets double the effective magnification due to crop factor compared to full frame. Canon no longer make the 60mm APS_C macro, the only real option for Sony is the 90mm macro which is a big lens and arguably a bit too long focal length on APS-C. The size and weight of lenses does add up. On Canon you would be using an adapter unless you use the 100mm RF macro lens.

Welcome Balazs, good to have you here.

Well I think the first thing I would do is reply to customer service and tell them in this case it's not more convenient and it's been 4 months already and I'm still without a lamp and by the way I expect the warranty to be extended as I've been without the product for so long already.

Warranty is only as good as the implementation and co-operation of the various cogs in the supply chain. I'm sure this is not the first time such issues have happened. I'm quite sure it will vary from country to country, but here is Australia warranty is the legal responsibility of the importer who brings it into the country, so for example if you buy a grey market item by direct import, you are the importer and responsible for warranty, however if buy a grey market item from a store in Australia - they are responsible. If warranty is to be legislated it makes sense that the legislation will place responsibility upon an in country entity where there is a chance at least that the rules may be enforced. These days in Australia, a lot of things UW based are not in stock and ordered in, the difference here being that the equipment comes in within a week of order assuming of course the supplier has it. Often a good approach is to post about your woes on the companies Facebook page rather than through private email if things are dragging on. You are in that situation because of the policies of SUPE and there may or may not be good reasons behind it. I suspect part of it could be to avoid having to pay import charges? Australia has good setup for warranty returns so that repaired or replacement items can be sent back without charging duty again. Indonesia may be different of course.

You could always ask them - my understanding is that the o-ring is laid in place and then pushed in all around- perhaps it's tool to push it in, they do say to install the acrylic? Pushing out the dome I am guessing would be different. I would think though that you might want to secure a replacement o-ring first if you go that way - I imagine it would be easy to damage pushing the dome out?? Is there no recourse with the people who shipped the dome to you?

Some nice shots there, some similar subjects to what we get in Sydney. As far as critique goes, I would suggest adjusting the black and white points in to meet the edge of the histogram, it gives the images a little more punch.

I'm aware of that issue, I have a Metabones adapter already and it has already been ground down which allows me to attach it to the camera. 5 minutes with a dremel style tool and touch is up with a black permanent marker.

Whatever you are doing in the way of a custom white balance or shooting a grey card for later reference it is important to have the neutral object photographed in the same light as the subject and if you are using a strobe or a video light it needs to be at the same distance. So for a TG-6 a small grey/white card you can photograph is probably better than fins as you can easily shoot it from much closer.

I had a look at that ad as I'm thinking of going that way eventually and your asking price is already more than the price of a new one in Australia by $120, looks like the asking prices for Nauticam gear in the UK are particularly steep!

Perhaps they will replace it with an adapter setup for the smart adapter rather than the speedbooster??

I've pointed to them on the reef and received only shoulder shrugs in response, even signalled I'm now pointing to the eye and it didn't help.

Polishing inside the dome can be fraught with difficulties as even if you can reach randomising your strokes may prove difficult and each grade would need to move beyond the area you worked with previous grade. It should be possible to pop out the dome element they are usually sealed with o-rings and it may be easier to work on? Replacement elements are not super expensive, for example and 8.5"dome port replacement element is 240 euro compared to 725 for a new dome at this site: https://fotografit.eu/products/28-nauticam-ports-n120/5241-85-acrylic-dome-replacement-with-o-ring/ Many years ago I bought the copper hill kit, which consisted of plastic paddles and a pack of Pec-Pads. You should be fine provided you have kept you Pec-Pads in a dust tight bag - NOT sitting out on you office bench, the only concern is having grit hitch a ride. The kit I had recommended 2 drops of fluid. For your streaks I think 3-4 drops should not be a problem.

Welcome onboard,

welcome onboard!