Big help for a new u/w photographer

Good morning from the sunny Greece,

I am a student in the dept. of Biology in Crete, and till now i shoot with my Canon G5 u/w

Now i need something more and i am looking to migrate into dslr, but what?

I am between Olympus E-510, Nikon D-80 and Canon 450D.

the use will be mainly for macro photography...

Housing will be Ikelite (is the cheapest? in the market).

Macro for olympus maybe this

Macro for Nikon ?

Macro for Canon?

Any help ???

Hi and welcome,

All of the camera that you mention are great units and the Ike housings are used by many people also.

Guess the main shooters fall into the two obvious camps Nikon and Canon and to be honest there probably is not a lot between them.

Myself if I was starting over then I would go Canon as they seem to have lower noise. Having said that if you are mainly macro then this is not so much of an issue as you are going to be using strobes up close anyhow and base ISO performance of all of the above is good.

To be honest I would look at what you can pick up and at what cost - maybe even consider buying second hand.

There are a number of second user D200 type setups about with 'upgrades' to D300 etc going on.

Oh and as for the lens issues - for the Nikon there is the 60mm and the 105mm - if you do a search in the archive here then you will find masses of information.

Paul C

Go for the camera with the biggest viewfinder. Since Olympus offers only a small sensor, the viewfinder will be to small.

If you want to do real macro, it is useful to be able to focus manually. Beside a big viewfinder you need a lens for which Ikelite can provide manual focus gear. If you choose a port which is 12mm longer than required by the lens you can combine your lens with an achromatic diopter later on to get even more macro. This makes sense if you chose a lens with a focal length of 105mm or more.

HTH,

Juergen