Chris Ross

Depending on what housing manufacturer to some extent the overall cost of housing a camera scales with sensor size. You might be able to pickup a good bargain on a housing but you might need to spend $$ for a new port depending on what sort of deal you get. In general smaller formats mean smaller ports which take yp less space when travelling and are generally cheaper. I'm talking about housing manufacturers with a system - they sell housings and a complete range of ports and extension rings that are matched well to your lenses. Wet lenses break this mould to a certain extent as some like the WWL can be used from m43 all the way through to full frame for specific camera brands that sell suitable lenses for them. As far as image quality is concerned anything from m43 will provide decent image quality. The EM-1mKII and OM-1 are very close in quality to a Nikon D500 for example and are good enough for many people. Your other consideration is strobes. For wide angle work you need a lot of strobe power , but smaller formats can generally shot at wider apertures so are less demanding of strobe power - this means you can get away with cheaper strobes, the INON S220 is a bargain in strobes and is quite suitable for wide angle work on m43 cameras, but quite marginal for full frame. The main point is look at the complete picture of what you would need to house a camera, buy the appropriate ports and extensions and strobes. Having said all of that a housing for a generation or two old camera should sell for about 30 to at most 50% of the new purchase price.

I'm in a similar position, the Z-240s are working well for me, but a little more power would be great for pelagics etc. The cost to upgrade is the cost os a trip more or less. There's a lot to be said for buying better water. The new INONs if they appear maybe interesting??

This seems like an issue that needs to be corrected by Sony. There is typically a setting to increase the viewfinder brightness setting to cope with for example flash photography so you can frame your image properly when using it as a viewfinder. But when you review the images in the same EVF, this should be disabled. I use Olympus and changing this setting to the auto brightness setting the viewfinder image is nice and bright, but when it flashes up the review image this setting is disabled and it shows the image as taken. Does Sony not have an option like this?

You can calculate the downward force on the button based on the diameter of the stem, assuming it's 5mm dia the force pushing down is around 0.5 kg at 30m. I would guess there is close to the limit. There's probably some sciction from the seals on the stem which would help, but it's still a risk diving without the cap. The o-ring seal for the cap also should be serviced periodically - a touch of o-ring grease will help.

The dive shops run trips out to Catalina Island and nearby areas, but it's nothing like what you get in areas like the Red Sea, they are only on weekends and the one I went on was basically just a ferry to get you to the dive site and they provided food and air fills. It was up to you to sort out buddies etc. Water will be dry suit cold in April most likely. This dive shop is located near the pier where the dive boats leave from: https://pacificwilderness.com/?page_id=521 I would suggest messaging them as a starting point for LA diving. I believe you should find similar dive shops around Monterey.

It seems opinions are split between those that don't see the value in spending extra for the Retras and those who don't mind spending more for what they see as incremental lighting quality. Either you the see the value or you don't, not saying either is right or wrong, everyone has their price point and quality standards. At the moment there's not a lot in the size range of the Z-240s - there's used Z-330s, the S&S YS-D3 and the Retras. The Supe and Backscatter strobes have their fans but they do weigh more and the Supe and to a lesser extent the backscatter is bigger. Ikelite strobes are good but very bulky and heavy. The Retras are approaching the weight of the Supe and Backscatter if you use the booster and are a little bigger than a Z-240. You would likely be shooting at a wider aperture on m43 so a little less demanding on power and the booster may not be necessary. The Z-240 are right on 700 gr with batteries and anything else comparable will weigh more I think YS-D# slightly more, the Retras about 180 gr more. The Supe and Backscatter are 1kg or more.

A number of approaches - the easy way is to use google lens, feed it the image and it will come back with suggestions. I tried it and it suggests this is Mexichromis trilineata. You can post it to one of the Facebook Nudi groups, Nudibase or Nudibranch Central ( read the rules first - they'll delet your post if you don't provide the right info). Lastly buy Nudibranch & Sea slug identification Indo Pacfic by Gosliner, Valdes and Behrens. It often pays to try a number of avenues, some species are difficult to ID or are undescribed so don't have an official name. Google lens even if it doesn't provide a correct hit first up often will get you to right family to start looking in your guide book. Be careful it is a slippery slope to nudi obsession😂

All macro lenses lose resolution as they stop down due to diffraction. Here is the MTF testing on lensTips: https://www.lenstip.com/214.4-Lens_review-Canon_EF_100_mm_f_2.8_L_Macro_IS_USM_Image_resolution.html and the 90mm macro: https://www.lenstip.com/561.4-Lens_review-Sony_FE_90_mm_f_2.8_Macro_G_OSS_Image_resolution.html The numbers are not directly comparable as they are tested on different sensor resolutions but you can see a drastic drop in quality at f16-22, so I expect you will see degradation at similar apertures on both lenses. The plots basically measure resolution and you can see it reduces after f11 or so. Optical limits also has a plot which is a little more complete for the 100mm f2.8 only, the dramatic drop beyond f16 is more obvious: https://opticallimits.com/canon/canon-rf-100mm-f-2-8-l-usm-is-macro/

They are not a diopter, rather a field flattening lens designed to pull the corners into focus, If I recall correctly they may change the field of view a little but are not really allowing closer focus like a diopter would. Single element field flatteners are common in astronomical applications for example.

I noticed an improvement shooting tiny bugs recently after upgrading firmware on my OM-1, it grabbed the bug and found the eye quite well. It's better than what I remember it doing.

Have to agree, the INON dive lights really are very good, a nice feature is an external o-ring that is positioned to just contact the light head when it is screwed on, they call it a sand ring I believe, but it's good enough to keep water out which means the o-rings stay clean dry and don't need regular service _ I look at them each time I pull the batteries but they never have grit or water drops. I use a 30 deg beam model with the included 60 deg diffuser and on low power it makes a perfect focus light, even the little 350 lumen models have enough light to work as a focus light in the hotshoe.

If you are trying to minimise expense you could look at Isotta housings. They use the S&S port system which are directly adaptable from Nauticam N120 ports and use the same extensions I believe, it involves changing the Nauticam lug ring to a S&S lug ring. You can do this for any Nauticam port with the lug ring attached by screws - it won't work for example on a port where the lug is machined. I seem to recall you can use INON viewfinders and perhaps Nauticam with an adapter. You would need new zoom rings I believe. You could email them an inquiry asking about what would be needed to use your existing lenses/ports and viewfinders. You may need an extension ring to accommodate the EF-RF converter if you are wanting to use your existing EF lenses.

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Back to your original question, S&S ports can be converted to Nauticam just by changing out the lug ring. An alternative is that Isotta housings can take S&S ports directly, they have the same lug ring. These options would allow you to bring your ports across. Nauticam have designed the Z8 housing to accept the Nikon F to Z mount adapter and use the same ports and zoom rings as would have been used with a Nauticam DSLR housing and Nikon F mount lenses - as a result the housing is thicker as the lens flange if located deeper inside the housing. Designed this way to make it as easy as possible to upgrade for a Nikon DSLR/Nauticam user. I'm not sure on the situation with Isotta, but as you are coming from S&S apart from housing thickness there is any difference that would impact you. I think Isotta may be an attractive solution though - the housings are cheaper and you don't need to do anything to use your ports - though contact them for advice to see if a different extension ring might be needed. If you plan to use your old lenses then an FTZ adapter is also needed.

It has to be a composite, blue ringed octopus are tiny, so likely a macro shot, and the split shot is wide angle. Even if you got the blue ring as a close focus wide angle shot , you would be so close that the jetty couldn't be in focus.

The CMC are generally paired with smaller sensors working with shorter focal length lenses, They will mostly work on full frame sensors and are in fact recommended for some lenses on full frame Canon and Nikon lenses notably the 60mm Nikon and Canon DSLT macro lenses and are listed in the port chart. The SMC is normally recommended as the better lens - that's not to say the CMC won't also work, just teh SMC is better Having said all that the CMC appears that it is slightly more powerful than the SMC-1 which is already achieving 2.2x at max magnification and physics dictates that the depth of field will be razor thin even at f22. I would think that the SMC would allow a fraction more working distance and depth of field but not much. the CMC would be giving 2.4- 2.7x magnification at min focus as a guesstimate based on the fact that the SMC is about equal to the CMC-2 on the 60mm Canon macro. If you are struggling with the CMC, the SMC will be a bit better but not night and day different I don't think. You might consider a less powerful lens as a first step - something like the INON UCL-90, or even UCL-165 it will achieve less magnification but will have better working distance than the SMC-1. If you look at the old wetpixel live video on the subject of macro wet lenses, Alex states his most used diopter is a +3 lens which gives just a little more magnification than the bare lens.

The concept behind the R50 is to use it with nauticam wet lenses so it has quite limited capabilities unless you go with the WWL which as you might guess is not cheap. For small capable rigs the choices are limited these days as there are not that many compact cameras sold. The 1"sensor models can be quite small and compact and seem to sell new for around $1000 $AU, Ebay prices are not much of a discount upon that, there doesn't seem to be a high volume of them coming up for sale. Besides these options you could also consider a number of m43 options like the AOI housings for Olympus EPL-9/10 and also some of the compact Panasonic options like the GX-8 or GX-85, these seem to sell for lower prices second hand. To keep it compact and easily clippable you would probably be looking for housings you can use without a tray - any time you add strobes the rig grows significantly in size. All of these models are discontinued and you would searching for second hand items.

Just be careful buying off sites like kayak and other flight booking sites, they will sometimes sell you an itinerary made up of individual tickets and the airlines won't check you through with that. The safest way remains to book a solid layover time. If you want to photograph birds, the SIngapore botanical gardens can be good, you can get the MRT there. The section with Heliconias attracts sunbirds. This is Brown Throated Sunbird taken there:

The issue may well be different ideas about what acceptable corners look like, but realistically no matter the lens f2 in a small dome is going to be hard on the corners.

For future reference you can get codeshare flights usually within the same airline alliance. In this case Luthansa is Star alliance and Garuda is skyteam, so unlikely to get all the flights on one itinerary. Flying from Europe KLM/Air France is Skyteam as is Garuda so you could try booking it through the either Garuda's website or Air France for example, how easy it will be depends upon the particular airlines website and which city in Indonesia you want to get to.

If you can do it anywhere you can do it in Changi - if and this is the big if - your flight arrives on time. The best trick if transiting is to have both flights on the same itinerary, that way you can get the luggage transferred through to final destination. Having separate tickets means of course the airlines normally won't check it through. Obviously too late in your situation but worth trying to achieve and even pay extra $$$ for IMO. Luggage normally arrives fairly quickly in Changi - immigration can be the slow step but mostly OK. You need to research to know exactly where to go with all your gear - as I recall there is a train between terminals. They say an hour before departure to be at the gate, but if you get to the check in on time and they accept your luggage they should let you on board as they would need to delay to get your luggage off the plane if you don't board. As you might know at Changi you clear immigration which is all automated these days then walk to the gate where you clear security if you are in the line to get inside the gate lounge you'll make your flight as the queues are not too bad as they are only screening your flight.