Chris Ross

In the Nauticam system it's easy as the camera is positioned in the housing so that you can use all or you current lenses, ports, extension tubes and zoom gears on your new housing. Put it another way the when you use the EF-RF converter the RF port chart has a line item which directs you to use the EF port chart. It does this by positioning the lens flange further back in the housing by the thickness of the EF-RF adapter. That way the the zoom gear will line up with the control gear in your new housing. You would be able to do this with other systems, but would need to buy various extension rings, zoom gears and sometimes ports. For example with Isotta you can convert Nauticam ports to work on Isotta by changing the lug ring, but not extension tubes and the zoom gears won't match. WHen the time comes prepare a spreadsheet to add up all the costs to see what you are up for in total.

Isn't this the same lens that @DreiFish tested and pronounced to have pretty poor optical quality in his thread from a little while back. Consulting google there are some tests that pronounce optical quality to be quite good and others such as the digital picture tests with sample images that pronounce it to be quite poor. I agree there are some very good lenses coming out now, but you still tend to get what you paid for. The searching of reviews suggests that there is a lot of sample variation in this lens so it's a bit of a lottery it would seem about how good the lens you get is. Or perhaps the good reviews received hand picked lenses to test?? BTW the test for the the 24-50 on digitalkamera.de seems to be behind a paywall. While I agree that having a sharp lens is great and certainly an interesting exercise to trying to find the sharpest you can for your UW photography and do not in any want to discourage your quest, when under water IMO flexibility is quite important as you can't swap to a more optimal lens like you can on land. Never mind the Ansel Adams quote: "There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept"

Yes you can use the Can 8-15 same as the 10-17. You set the zoom limiter to 10mm and can zoom from 10-15mm with APS-C, better image quality, less zoom range, more weight, and can be used on Marelux compared to the Tokina 10-17 Yes you need to read the fine print in the port charts: this is because the small housings don't have a zoom control it must be on the lens extension and all they offer is the 6"dome in this format Regarding the m43 option , I have the OM-1, you have a lot of options for housings and Isotta is a good option if you want to adapt a Canon 8-15. Here is the parts list in this post: SO you could price out this option. I did it with Nauticam, but it ends up expensive as you need an N85-N120 adapter which are really pricey and Nauticam no longer makes the specific adapter and their ports and extension rings are pricey. I got some of the items second hand. You will need the metabones adapter - the latest model EF-M43 is needed due to geometry of the OM-1, but I have an older version I filed down to fit. The image quality is great though. This gallery is all taken with OM-1 and Canon 8-15: https://www.aus-natural.com/Underwater/Walindi%20Resort%20PNG/index.html I did have a few issues with noise on a couple of deep dives on overcast days, but doing it again I think easily compensated by upping the ISO and shooting a little wider open. Shooting at f8 is generally enough so you can use less powerful strobes. If you can source the FML-3 mini flash to trigger strobes it is a cheap and reliable option for manual triggering. Be aware though in Nauticam the housing ends up quite heavy and needs a fair bit of flotation, the small housing size is less buoyant and the 8-15 is a heavy lump of glass.

In my opinion fisheyes are less sensitive to precise dome position. I took a great deal of time comparing the images at two different dome positions in the linked testing thread. I went as far as downloading the two comparison images and taking a 100% crop from the extreme corners and pasting them together in a single image to compare them. I squinted, compared different areas of the images but I really struggled to see an earth shattering difference in the two images; Here's the post, let me know if you can see anything significant. As far as the the image presented by the OP, the corner crops where it is really blurry all appear to be foreground or background elements that are falling outside the depth of field. It seems like you must be really close as the BG behind the eel's head is quite out of focus, likewise the bottom right crop the foreground rock is quite out of focus it seems. With slightly less magnification you could look at focusing on an important foreground element rather than the subject , other wise crop out objectionable parts of the image or stop down a little more. Also looking at the composition before shooting to avoid large out of focus foreground areas which tend to look more objectionable than background being out of focus. There is is also the fact that images viewed at 100% crop often don't look fantastic, but when presented in the final image and sharpened well, the overall image generally looks great. As Chip said the 2x converter is softening things a little, it provides flexibility more so than the ultimate image sharpness. It's only really possible to do this because the bare 8-15 is such a sharp optic in the first place. You could consider also trying the 1.4x and give up on a little zoom range and trade it off for image sharpness. While it is important to understand the various trade offs in dome ports and fussing over details, eventually you have to just get out and take some images. Work out how to best process and crop them and enjoy the overall image.

Thanks @Vkalia ! - I think he was thinking about smashing me but decided I was too big a target and scurried off, only got 3-4 frames off. I try to do my macro without too many black backgrounds, coming from a land based macro background- black backgrounds were frowned upon unless the subject was nocturnal- it's more of a challenge to get a nice ambient lit BG I think.

Ikelite are fairly unique and were mostly setup to use ikelite strobes with wired connectors but have just started optical triggering recently. They tend to push TTL as they claim no one else knows how to do it. I think after using Nauticam you may find the ikelite housings a bit basic for want of a better word. You need to see what ports they offer and read the fine print for your chosen lens option there are some interesting limitations sometimes. They are also not that compact, basically a big cube with a lot of space inside. They don't offer a compact 4"dome port for fisheyes for example. The dome options for the mirrorless housings like this one are quite limited. the only dome options allowing zoom is the 6.5"dome with a zoom knob on the extension. Unfortunately you picked camera models that only have ikelite or Nauticam housings available. I'd suggest a good start would be to choose your lens options and work back through the ports to available housings to finally arrive at a camera choice. If you wanted a WWL for example the 18-45 is supported for Nauticam and if you can use it on Nauticam you could also set it up on Marelux. If you wanted a 10-17, it takes 20mm less extension than the Canon 8-15 so a Nauticam 10mm extension, however Marelux doesn't seem to have a 10mm extension so it looks like it may be a non starter on that system for R7. You could use a the excellent Canon 8-15 with it though on either system. If you wanted an extremely flexible wide angle setup you could run an adapted Canon 8-15 on m43 and have the ability to zoom from full diagonal fisheye to a field equivalent to a 28mm rectilinear wideangle - full frame equivalent but with barrel distortion from the fisheye. The cheapest way to do that would be in Isotta with a special extension with zoom gear and a 4.5"dome port on their OM-1 housing. So it's a fisheye, part of WWL range setup and a 14-18 (FF equivalent ) lens all in one setup. I use this setup with Nauticam and it is excellent if a little heavy. The m43 sensor is good enough for what I do. On the question of port charts for EF lenses the main housing manufacturers have their systems to allow use of EF lenses on the RF-EF adapter, Nauticam housings for example setup the housings to you can use the recommended ports and zoom gears for your EF lens from the EF port charts with the RF housing and it all works. Isotta has and RF-EF adapter ring, but they don't support the R7. You could also look into the Marelux R7 housings They do support the Canon 8-15.

Don't know what the flight costs are like but you can fly into Singapore from most European cities with a lot of choices of airline and there is a direct flight to Manado with resorts in North sulawesi. I think you can go direct into Jakarta from Amsterdam on Garuda. Then there is a huge array of resorts in Indonesia you could connect to you could check ones that the winds are favourable at from quite a big list. There is also options to Bangkok and getting to Phuket area or Malaysia and various dive spots there. I think Air France flies direct to Manila and lots of resorts to choose from there, You can fly to Bali as well with many options, but mostly 1 stop on the way.

If you need that much flotation I would suggest you don't want it all on the strobe arms, though if you just attach floats with no arms you can place them horizontal rather than vertical. I had 1760 gr in an M formation on my rig and it tool a LOT of torque to point it up even though it was close to neutral. I ended up taking off two smaller float arms and running it negative. I'm thinking of finding some block rigid foam and placing about -400 gr worth under the housing, bolting it on through the tripod screws.

Generally it needs some contaminant to draw in the moisture if humidity is high but not an actual fog that deposits liquid water . Salts draw in water and the deposit becomes conductive. A day to day example is salt shakers that salt clumps up in and stop working. Regularly cleaning contacts should be a good prevention measure.

I would suggest as it's mostly used for macro with a dark BG , colour temperature probably doesn't matter, just adjust white balance to taste, you are not trying to balance ambient light against strobe light generally. Agree it doesn't seem published anywhere and as it's a small linear flash tube, kelvin value is probably high.

The 30mm macro is limited to about 0.5x for practical purposes, min focus of 1:1 is close to right on the port glass and hard to achieve and light. The 60mm macro is the best option IMO, the Pany 45mm is also a possibility, but the lens will probably cost more. If you want only one macro lens for me 60mm > 45mm > 30mm. The only downside of the 60mm is you have to backup quite a bit for bigger subjects.

So you are saying you don't have enough arm to mount stix floats I assume? I've had good experience with the INON Mega float arms : https://underwater.com.au/shop/inon-mega-float-arms.html?srsltid=AfmBOor-N9Og_rOsVktINaj5kcBjeHfFdAxIgvWnuYQp-zD7ocxAZywL available in either 390 or 650 gram buoyancy, I've had mine quite a few years, they seem quite durable and price is not crazy. I also have a couple of Isotta float arms, basically an aluminium shell, they cost a little more, I have two of 670 gr arms for my wide angle setup, quite a bit cheaper than Nauticam but seem like they should be durable., about 40% cheaper than Nauticam. The Isotta are limited to 70mm dia so are quite long if you need a lot of buoyancy, the INON are big diameter and shorter. a long clamp between the two arms of each side to the M helps to get them to fold flat against each other.

Might be good light quality, but 1200 lumens seems a little weak, probably be OK with macro where you can get in really close. The thing with video lights is you are trying to add reds and yellows into the ambient light and this one will do that a little but will be over powered by the ambient light in shallow water. I see they have a 4000 lumen model which would probably do better - it's $549. Of course look for reviews, need to confirm that paying the extra $$$ will actually deliver good CRI. Don't know if you saw Blue water photo has a comparison table: https://www.bluewaterphotostore.com/best-underwater-video-lights/?srsltid=AfmBOopHlreMa-kGVb6def7NBCwtFGPY3ti-JcEd7TUrNuAfK3Cvptcn

I've looked on and off for websites covering contact degradation, but really can't find anything like the AI output above and I really can't find anything definitive about this. There are a great many Li-ion based items, around, I'm thinking of things like power tools, ultra bright spotlight torches etc and if this was common there would be something out there. These strobes draw a lot of power but they are really not pushing the envelope, things like Li-ion power tools - I looked up specs for a small saw from De walt, it uses and a 6 A-hr 18V battery rated to provide up to 800W of power, this is 44 amps at 18V. If the issues with terminal contacts is related to amps, you would expect to see it on something like this. and I couldn't find anything like this on power tools - and these are used in rather dirty environments. The fact of the matter is for electrochemical corrosion to occur you need moisture, you can get this if there are salts of some type on the contacts, fingerprints have a little salt, or you might be pushing traces of salt water in from water droplets on the o-ring if you don't dry it off. Certainly high currents can accelerate this type of corrosion but unless the contact is that bad you get arcing, clean terminals should not corrode. If they are corroding poor quality materials cant be ruled out, it is hard to judge quality just by looking, the quality and materials used in plating can vary significantly for example and choice of base metal can have an impact. Springs can also be too light and fatigue over time so contact pressure is reduced. A question was asked on the Retra maxi post and Oskar replied that Retra uses a multi layer plating on their contacts and claim not to have had issues unless they have flooded. As an aside, my company is in an "AI will be the key to success" phase and are busy exploring ways to use it. Talking to some people who have tried, they say it's great for writing reports, organizing facts, all sorts of language tasks, but it tends to suck at technical topics. They are language models working what words should be placed in what sequence based on all of the content they have ingested and the starter phrase provided. Very easy to mix things from different fields to write a load of rubbish, the Joule heating equation for example is rather garbled. The correct answer is that 0.01 ohms at 20A produces 4W of heat.

Thanks Chip, pleased we could help. Happy New year!

So I assume the trick is to have the housing in trim and close to neutral and just loosely hold to avoid transferring your movement to the housing. For trim a large acrylic dome for example will make the housing want to twist upwards and make life particularly difficult pointing anywhere other than it's natural position with the dome pointing up.

That should work pretty well as long as the lenses don't interfere too much with sight-lines

I was using it today, Vis was quite ordinary with plenty of particles, shooting a nudi about 80mm long, where I would usually think twice about attaching the MFO3, but getting in closer made a big difference in particles in the images. Focus is indeed quite snappy.

Perhaps, just have to try it out, the only concern you might have if it gets in the way of aiming, which becomes more of a problem as you increase magnification. Will that system restrict your strobe arm movement at all? I'm not sure exactly how it will work but sounds like you are connecting your two inner arms together with the 8 arm?

If you have trouble finding somewhere to mount a bayonet caddy - one solution is float arms in place of stix floats - they generally have a mounting point for a caddy I use the INON float arms, price is reasonable and i've been using them for many years. I used shorts for the MFO3 in Lembeh, it worked quite OK and I didn't attach it to tether in the pocket- but it's a big lump of glass and the elastic pocket held it tight particularly with bayonet adapter ring attached. It wasn't exactly easy to get in there, but I worked my way around it. Regarding the MFO1, I haven't heard it's a great improvement on m43, it's basically just a weak diopter. You could try leaving it on and stacking the UCL lens for more power. Stacking a CMC on an MFO1 is not recommended as both correct for the water interface, but there was some discussion you could do it with a third party diopter. You could add a flip to the MFO-1 perhaps, but it would be easy enough to try it first before buying more gear.

It is quite common to see vignetting like this in lenses for mirrorless cameras, the manufacturers will do this to produce a cheaper lens and correct the errors electronically. I found a review on line with an image both corrected and uncorrected and it appears what Canon has done is the lens uncorrected has a field of view a bit wider than 24mm and as the lens has a lot of barrel distortion which stretches the corners that they pull in to create a 24mm wide frame electronically. Doing this they avoid having to correct for the strong barrel distortion. ( of course I don't have the lens in hand and it's equally possible that the correction produces an image that's not as wide as a true 24mm lens - this would be a good project to compare the 24mm field (corrected) with that of an L lens like the 24-105) That aside a lot of reviews regard this lens as not the sharpest knife in the drawer so unfortunately FF Canon users are stuck with a wet optics lens that is less than ideal. The Nikon equivalent 24-50 is reportedly much sharper. Which brings up another point, that wet optics like the WWL can't improve a soft lens. One of the claims when the WWL first appeared was that domes degraded images enough that you could match the performance of a top line 16-35 lens in a large dome with the kit lens mated with a WWL. In some cases you could, but not all kit lenses are created equal and the RF 24-50 is a lot less equal than something like the EF 28-70 lens that can be mated with the WACP or the Sony 28-60. Having said that one or two reviews said the optics were OK - perhaps there is sample variability with these lenses or those reviews were not representative?? So the sad truth is that for Canon users who want to use wet wide optics - at least from Nauticam is that the 24-50/WWL-C combination provides flexibility but at the cost of less than stellar performance and it seems the WACP-C is a better option?

Hi Mike, welcome onboard!

However this site from Reef photo suggests it may not work for a YS-D1, see item 3) : Reef Photo & VideoTroubleshooting Strobes With Electrical SyncFew things can be more frustrating on a trip than when your usually reliable electrically triggered strobes suddenly stop working.Ikelite has a similar page for their strobes.

The Lumen ratings on cheap lights in aliexpress and similar sites are likely works of fiction. I have heard many say they all seem to come from the same factory, so not much to choose between them until you get into named brands and more $$$. The reason for warm light is that when colour balancing on the subject, the background water becomes a deeper blue, this is mainly used in strobes for still images. Strobes are way more powerful than lights and I would expect that you would struggle to get the same effect on video as the amount of artificial light is generally less than what you get with a strobe as you need to push the colour temperature further overall to get the same colour balance on the subject with less artificial light added.

Hello Julio, welcome to the forum, good to have you here. I pasted your text into Notepad, a plain text editor which strips formatting and copied and pasted back to forum - this allows the text to wrap. If you paste in text from external sources this can help to ensure it displays prperly on the forum.