Thanks to everyone who gave mee feedback when I was looking to buy a housing for my 7D.
I eventually went with the following set-up:
7D + 15-85 + 100mm macro + 10-17mm Tokina
Hugyfot housing, with acrylic dome, macro port and 50mm extension ring
Single Inon z240 with B&H fantasea arms and fibreoptic connection
This gave me the ability to use the 10-17 or 15-85 in the dome and the 100mm behind the flat glass and the strobe could be placed anywhere thanks to the triple section arm.
Andy at Divelife placed the order for me and even managed to shave a bit off the price by amending the order to require less items to achieve the same set-up. Service was great - if you are listenning thanks Andy :-)
When I received it the dome looked like it was scratched - but this turned out to be some residue from the neoprene cover and came off on the first dive.
Hugy also send the wrong hotshoe mount which had me scratching my head when I did the first test as I couldn't get the strobe to fire at all. This was, of course, as the hotshoe mount had triggered the reed switch to say an external strobe was on so don't fire the internal one!). They have since replaced this with the correct one FOC and the wrong one was still useable (albeit not mounted propoerly on the hotshoe).
Overall impression of the system is very good.
The housing is small and very well balanced underwater (I don't seem to need floats on the arms) with a slight tendancy to float dome up (no bad thing with rocks around!).
All controls are accessible (except for the flash pop up button - but you can force the flash to pop up by covering the lens and setting the camera to noddy auto mode) and you can see the viewfinder, main screen and small top screen to see the settings etc. I do find it hard to see all the viewfinder information so the top screen was more useful than I thought it would be.
The Hugycheck system of vacuuming the housing proved invaluable as one of the screws had come a bit loose on one dive but the vacuum kept it all held together with no leaks until well back on the boat. I also discovered that you don't actually need the vacuum pump as it is perfectly possible to suck through the oneway valve in reduce the pressure sufficiently (useful when I left the pump in the bedroom one day!).
Before I went I thought I would need to use the custom setting a lot to make life easy but in reality I found it was best to set the camera on Manual and fiddle as I went.
The other thing that suprised me was the quality of the 15-85 lens. I really didn't expect this to be a great choice and had taken it as a back-up but in the end I found that the 100mm could be hard to hold still in a swell (no IS) and with a +4 dioptre on the 15-85 I could get better fish shots with this lens through the dome - although true macro was better with the 100mm. This actually made the 15-85 the go to lens if I didn't know what I would see as the Tok was too wide for fish shots as I often couldn't get close enough.
Focusing seemed very fast and accurate in all conditions with all lenses and I was able to get shots of jacks swimming past very fast that I would not have been able to get with my compact camera.
TTL via fibreoptic worked very well generally (even with silver scaled fish) but if you squash the cable as I did then TTL no longer works as the light is not transmitted properly (so I had to cut an inch off the end to correct the issue).
Mistakes I made:
- when I shot in portrait close to the surface I often got flare - need to make a neoprene ring to prevent this as the lens shield only really covers top and bottom
- same flare issue if I moved the strobe in front of the axis of the camera when it was out to the side of the housing
- 15-85 zoom ring is a bit too loose and after a a few zooms tended to fall off - need to find a way of holding it in place better
- be careful where the optical cable emerges from teh housing - it is easy to squash it with a strobe arm
- always remember to tighten the screws holding the housing together, then vacuum, then tighten again to ensure not loose!
Overall though I am very happy but would like some constructive criticism of my shots ... Here is one and there are some more in my gallery - not sure how to put the right link here but I'm sure someone can do it!
Please feel free to comment appropriately :-)
Cheers
