5DII HD in poor vis!

At last I managed to get my 5DMkII into its housing and underwater - a baptism of fire as it was in use straight away. I can't post material because its being shot for a company however reviewing in Quicktime did at least show that the combination of 5DII, 15mm fisheye, Seacam housing and Wideport yield surprisingly good results even in very dull weather (10/10 and darkish, and poor visibility (2~3m)) - certainly far more effective that the A1U we were also using, in these conditions. Accessing live view and video shooting are easy enough on the Seacam underwater and the twin handles give a pretty stable grip - sequences shot were up to about 2 minutes (although this isn't a problem with a 32Gb card!). Using a finder GPro with the cut down base allowed for a good LCD view and focus was fine by pressing the focus button prior to shooting and checking the result. All in all if the production company can deal with the 30fps and add and sync the separate sound track then the 5DII looks like a very usable system - certainly in poor conditions where a fisheye is a viable option. Surprisingly the camera's microphone picked up speech from a full face mask even through the water! I look forward to using it in good conditions.

Thanks Paul.

How did the corners look with the wide port? Is there no focus gear available for the 15 FE? I suppose with the DOF of the FE, there really isn't a need for focus.

Corners looked ok - not really much detail to concentrate on and in the low contrast conditions nothing showed up as being glaringly poor.

Yes there is a focus gear but I found it easy to hit the focus button, allow the mirror to flip up and then zoom on the display which seemed to work fine.

DoF was good but if I got too close then some softness appeared.

All in all, its the ability to use a full frame fisheye which is so useful - especially as I had it and the port already. I haven't had chance to shoot underwater stills yet but on land it certainly delivers superb files. I've been using the 5DII for time-lapse sequences too - hence the 32Gb card - above water so far but hope to trial some underwater soon.