5d ii or Nikonos V?

Hello,

I am new to the forum so thank you in advance for any advice. I have done a lot of research but can not find exactly what I am looking for.

I have been an avid photographer for about three years now. I have a canon 5d mark ii with 28-70mm l and 70-300 l series lenses. I also recently purchase a Nikonos V with 15mm and a few Ikelite strobes. I have never used film before but I was able to get the entire Nikonos set from a retired photographer who kept everything in pristine condition for less than $500. I could not pass it up considering the 15mm lens can go for more than that. My question now is, if I were to take the plunge and buy an underwater housing for my canon 5d ii with strobes etc, would the results I got from that be much better than the Nikonos V using High grade slide flim? My question is not which will be easier because obviously digital is far easier. I am mainly concerned with which will produce higher quality images. Ideally, I would like the challenge of mastering the Nikonos and buying a quality scanner to scan my own prints into digital for post processing. Cost is not my concern, only quality. I am in the Army and stationed in Hawaii so I try to dive atleast once a week. My bonus will be used pretty much entirely on photography gear so I just want to make sure that I end up with the best set up possible. If the Nikonos and Good slide film can produce the same images or better images than my 5d I would much rather stick with the Nikonos for UW shots and keep the Canon for above water shooting. Again I apologize for being yet another newbie asking probably the same question youve seen 1000 times but as Ive said, I have done considerable research and have not been able to find many people who use the 5d ii for underwater shots let alone a comparison between the two. Thank you for your time.

Jim

I forgot to mention that the reason that I purchased the Nikonos is because I am a marine biology major and I will be taking as many photography classes as possible. The first couple of classes are film based classes so I figured the nikonos could double as my film camera for class as well as my UW camera for diving.

I've never shot on film, but my Dad owns and uses a Nikonos V and 15mm lens. My understanding is that the 15mm is an underwater lens only, and won't focus well in air. Dad always felt that the colour depth of slide film was superior to what could be produced digitally, but I suspect digital might be getting closer.

In terms of quality of shots, the competency of the user is a big factor. Using my 5DII, I think I've taken over 30,000 underwater shots in two years. There's no way I'd have had that learning experience with film, and there's no way I'd be getting the same pictures in the same amount of time. You can have a look at some of my stuff on my website below. If money is really no object, house the 5DII - then you can compare for yourself!

Jim, to answer your quality questions- yes you can get amazing photos with the UW Nikkor 15mm.

In my old days, I would take each precious slide to a pro lab and have Ilfochrome prints made. This was when people used an enlarger and knew how to dodge & burn. Not every slide could be printed that way, but those that did had an almost 3 dimensional look. Unfortunately these direct prints are mostly a lost art.

Scanning film can get very tricky. You'll see why we all love to shoot digital. My expeience is tha a good lab using a scanner with very high dynamic range can pull it off. I have an Epson 4490 scanner with a 3.4 Dmax and it doesn't come close to a true high end scan.

I'm sure many people here started with the Nikonos setup. My brother used a Nikonos I in the 70's and produced pretty nice B&W images. I started with the Nikonos V and now have the 5D Mark II.

Since you already own it, give it a try!! I am not sure the availability of processing labs, or the timeliness of processing for slides anymore so that would be the only drawback. The real advantages of digital for me were the instant feedback and the almost unlimited number of photos. You can see your images and correct on the fly and you don't have to be too selective of test shots and/or bracketing. It always seemed to me very limiting to have only 36 exposure film per dive.

Good luck and look forward to seeing your results!

David

I suspect that you will find the UW photography learning curve will be 10-20 times faster with the instant feedback on the DSLR versus the Nikonos. Yes the Nikonos has the potential to take as good or better photos relative to the DSLR, however it may take you a several hundred dives with the Nikonos (adding film/development costs) to make the progress you could make in 10-20 dives with the DSLR.

I suspect that you will find the UW photography learning curve will be 10-20 times faster with the instant feedback on the DSLR versus the Nikonos. Yes the Nikonos has the potential to take as good or better photos relative to the DSLR, however it may take you a several hundred dives with the Nikonos (adding film/development costs) to make the progress you could make in 10-20 dives with the DSLR.

Thank you everybody for the feedback. Mainly, I am interested in film and would like to stick with film if I can achieve the same or better results. My only issue right now is focusing. Because I am used to being able to focus through the viewfinder and SEE what is in focus, i am having an extreme difficulty taking pictures with the proper focus. Just yesterday I had a baby octopus living in a clam shell with one eye sticking out that would have made for an excellent photo. I was in deep water and my strobe was dying so I set the f stop to 4 and tried my best to get a good shot. The exposure was perfect but the pictures were all out of focus. I do not know how I can take macro shots when I can not see what is in focus through the viewfinder. Any advice on that would also be extremely helpful. As for trying to scan the slides, for the price of a housing for my 5d ii, (upwards of 3500 to 4,000) I can buy a top of the line scanner and still have quite a few dollars left over so I think that is a fair trade off. Anybody who has had a lot of experience with the Nikonos V and 15mm lens that could offer some advice I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you everybody that has taken the time to help me, it is very much appreciated.

I learned more in a year with a small digital camera than in ten with film, including Nikonos cameras. Light is so tricky underwater that you need to shoot thousands of images to get a feel for it...

... and it's harder if you have mastered terrestrial light.

All the money to house a good camera with an excellent viewfinder is worth it, but AF can give pretty good results if the viewfinder image is difficult to see through a diving mask.

I gave up scanning transparencies long ago: it just doesn't compete with the productivity of shooting RAW files.

The 15mm lens is a beauty, one of the best, if not the absolute best, water-contact optics ever made but it's all academic because the facility to shoot repeatedly and revise your images in the field overwhelms everything else in getting a great underwater image.

Hoarding 36 frames is real enemy of creativity, too...

Tim

Thank you everybody for the feedback. Mainly, I am interested in film and would like to stick with film if I can achieve the same or better results. My only issue right now is focusing. Because I am used to being able to focus through the viewfinder and SEE what is in focus, i am having an extreme difficulty taking pictures with the proper focus. Just yesterday I had a baby octopus living in a clam shell with one eye sticking out that would have made for an excellent photo. I was in deep water and my strobe was dying so I set the f stop to 4 and tried my best to get a good shot. The exposure was perfect but the pictures were all out of focus. I do not know how I can take macro shots when I can not see what is in focus through the viewfinder. Any advice on that would also be extremely helpful. As for trying to scan the slides, for the price of a housing for my 5d ii, (upwards of 3500 to 4,000) I can buy a top of the line scanner and still have quite a few dollars left over so I think that is a fair trade off. Anybody who has had a lot of experience with the Nikonos V and 15mm lens that could offer some advice I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you everybody that has taken the time to help me, it is very much appreciated.

Well, you guys weren't kidding. I went on a dive today and took (what i expected to be) great shots. Apparently after two or three shots, the film somehow came off the sprockets and when I thought I was advancing the film, I was really just exposing the same slide over and over. I have no idea how this happened. All I know is that I had some great shots lined up and I am pretty frustrated. Also, I have just been taking the film to get developed at 1 hour photo and put on a cd because I haven't gotten a hang of film yet so I dont expect any great shots. However, I was wondering how everybody else develops their "keepers" because the images from the 1 hour photo are obviously not top quality. I am completely new to film and am appreciative of every bit of advice I can get. I know some of you have many years of experience and I appreciate you taking the time to read my posts.

Well, you guys weren't kidding. I went on a dive today and took (what i expected to be) great shots. Apparently after two or three shots, the film somehow came off the sprockets and when I thought I was advancing the film, I was really just exposing the same slide over and over. I have no idea how this happened. All I know is that I had some great shots lined up and I am pretty frustrated. Also, I have just been taking the film to get developed at 1 hour photo and put on a cd because I haven't gotten a hang of film yet so I dont expect any great shots. However, I was wondering how everybody else develops their "keepers" because the images from the 1 hour photo are obviously not top quality. I am completely new to film and am appreciative of every bit of advice I can get. I know some of you have many years of experience and I appreciate you taking the time to read my posts.

1.) Focus & use

Check out Jim & Cathy Church's Nikonos Handbook

2.) Development

I don't know who is doing E6 processing. I used Fuji or Kodak mailers. Check the net for current processors.

Don't be afraid to use the higher ISO slide film.

Luck,

Bob

If you insist on using film and are using slide film (if you are not, you should) then I think A&I. You can get their mailers from B&H.

But I agree with everyone else, you will get better pics from digital, that battle is long over.

Bill

Jim,

You should have the Nikonos serviced once a year. There are internal o-rings that can crack. These should be replaced. The service would also address the film winding issue. I have always used Backscatter; they're top notch. Your lens may also need service periodically.

I have never taken a close focus wide angle shot with the 15mm at f/4. That's going to be very difficult without a strobe. You had better check the focus carefully.

+1 for Jim Church's book. I also recommend books by Martin Edge and Howard Hall/Brian Skerry.

Hi,

let me introduce myself, i'm new to the forum too, my name is Cristiano from Italy passionate diver and amateur uw photographer.

After 12 years of Nikonos now my beloved camera flooded this month. always a sad moment...it's my second one.

i really loved the small size and lens quality but the 36 shots limit, the price for processing and scanning the slides, the long workflow to digitize them…

Quality can be really amazing but the learning curve is hard, you really have to "imagine" the photo, it's almost all manual with very few electronic help.

You have to evaluate distance,light, speed…and then wait and wait to see the results.

Pre-digital photography:blink: ( a geological time ago..) experience can really help.

Nikonos body can be relatively cheap and may be you can test and the decide.

but for me it's time to move to digital….too many advantages.

Cris ex-Nikonos V

You can have a look here to some of my pictures

http://www.blurb.com/books/1269959

As a someone who used a Nikonos III in the 80s, I can tell you that while it is theoretically possible to get better images from the Nikonos than you could from the Canon 5DmkII, in practical terms you will almost never do it.

With a film camera you are limited to 30-40 shots per dive and you get no feedback on the shots until you get them processed. The number of keepers will be a small percentage and you will also reduce the number of shots of each subject to save film.

With a digital camera you can take hundreds of shots on the one dive. You get instant feedback on the LCD and very quick feedback on a larger screen at home. Just taking more shots is going to result in more keepers.

I'm far from sure that it is theoretically possible to get better image quality from a Nikonos 15mm lens. The Nikonos 15mm lens is now a pretty old design. Yours was a modified design from the original one if it works on a Nik5. Despite what everyone thinks it does use a dome just like dSLR housings and wide-angles and is equivalent to a 20mm lens behind a dome port. In terms of image quality I would say that a 5D2 with a reasonably large port and decent wide-angle lens will deliver considerably better image quality far more consistently for a variety of straightforward reasons, the most significant of which is that unlike the Nik5/15mm a dSLR offers PRECISION focus. And modern lenses, correctly set up behind a dome are also much later designs and will almost certainly provide better image quality although its difficult to carry out a true comparison as there is currently no way of actually using a Nikonos 15mm lens with a full-frame sensor and I am not going there with the film vs. digital debate (ask yourself how many photographers still both prefer and still use film today though). Nice and compact as a Nik5/15mm lens is, it is at least 27 year old (the Nik5 was introduced in 1984 I think) technology and compared to state-of-the-art digital technology it is hard work to use and offers imprecise control, exposure, etc. I'd house the 5D2 personally!

[i do own and still use old lenses (I often use a 21mm Super-Angulon from 1964) but usually because I like the way that they render images due to their lower optical corrections. Modern lenses are better designed and better corrected.]

is it possible to get a better image from an N5 over a 5dmk2? Yes, of course, anything is possible. However, given that on any one dive you have 36 exposures for the N5 vs over 400 (using a 16GB card)....your chances of scoring a great shot is more than 12 times higher with the 5dmk2, add the instant feedback, modern lenses and precise focusing that you can do with a DSLR over a rangefinder system, the odds are strongly stacked against the Nik. You say that to house the camera will cost you a lot, if you factor in the cost of film and processing, you'll see that it rapidly evens out over the life of the system. You can learn more in one week of diving with the DSLR than you could in months of diving with the N5. You say you already have the Ike strobes, then you can go ahead and get the Ike housing for the 5dmk2, though unless they're newer DS strobes (not likely given your $500 purchase price), you can get TTL capability with the Ikelite housing.

I dropped my housed film SLR the minute I got my 10D in the water 8 years ago. I never looked back...well, except to want to go back to the places where I shot film and re-shoot them digitally!

cheers

S.

I have both digital and analogue systems. Comparing a housed 5DII with a NikV is like comparing, say, a new BMW X5 with a 20-year old Hilux.

Different purpose, comfort, ability and price point. Both will probably get you there.

A new-ish high-end DSLR, lens and domeport costs about 10x as much as a Nik V with a 15mm lens for starters and does things differently. Both are very good at what they were made for and can yield publishable results.

So the real questions are perhaps:

Do you feel you need to justify the ridiculous cost of a new high-spec UW system? Alternatively: Are you into nostalgia? Do you want to pull chicks at the dive shop, or just want take some nice photos underwater? (joking). Are you happy to deal with inconveniences? (such as manual- and scale-focus, non-instant feedback, finder parallax issues, 36 exposures/dive, the need to scan the film unless you're an Ilfochrome masorchist).

The 15mm UW-Nikkor is the best wide for UW use ever made, full stop, (ok, short of the 13mm RS perhaps), although by far not as flexible as say a wide AF zoom on a DSLR. However, for the price and the basic fun.....

The Nikonos V with 15mm lens and Fuji Velvia is easily capable of producing BETTER UW photos than digital. The 15mm was designed for UW and film still has a wider range of tones. It doesn't take that long to learn IF you take the time to learn exposure and depth of field principles. Get a good strobe(s), properly set hyper-focal for conditions, and you can concentrate on composition with the smallest, most agile rig on the boat.

If your focus was off you either need to learn to judge distances better or learn how to set hyper-focal focus. It's quite wide on the 15mm. However, although viewfinder parallax needs to be considered for close focus, the viewfinder is extremely easy to see through. The Nikonos 28mm is also a dedicated UW lens capable of exceptional results, although more difficult to use. I have a dedicated viewfinder for mine that is so rare I've never seen another or even a catalog listing for it. Is it the only piece of Nikon gear that never had a model number on it?

Yeah, it sucks to not have instant feedback and be limited to 36 exposures per dive. But, I still carry my Nikonos 5 when I want a small rig for strong currents, beach entries, or just to enjoy a dive for the sake of diving without concentrating on photography yet still have a camera along if I see something interesting. If I were you, I wouldn't hesitate to burn some film through that rig.

Could a experienced underwater photographer take a better shot? Emphasis on experienced... Potentially, but the chances are it would only be very rarely that it happened and the 5D MkII would take the better shots far more often. Also, depends on what you then want to use the shot for and how large you want to print it. If you are hoping to produce large prints then you are a lot better off with the Canon.

The comparative cost of learning would be a fair amount higher with the Nikonos. Think about the cost of the films and then developing them. From having had a quick look on the net seems about $7 per film then presume developing cost say $5 though it is probably more. For me, when i first got my housing for the 5D MkII i shot around 10,000 shots in the first 3 months (i dive 2-4 times a day, pretty much every day). ok, so that is a lot of shots but i just could never have taken the scope of shots and learnt nearly as fast. I had been shooting with a point and shoot for a few years before so i was not totally new to shooting underwater but when moving to the larger dSLR it almost felt like starting again. Simple maths.. if you work it out to be $12 per 36 shots.. it works out to be a bit below $3500 to have taken the same number of shots with the nikon.

If you really want to shoot with the Nikonos i personally think that by far the best route would be to get a housing for you 5D, and learn and practice with that. Sure take a few with the Nik at while your at it, you already have it so why not... It will just take you so much longer to gain the same experience just using the nik, then when you are have the best of both worlds and can come back and say which you think reigns! But hey, if you don't really care about having lots and lots of incredibly frustrating dives with a lot of unusable shots costing you a considerable amount of cash to take.. then hell, just stick with the nikonos. Still reckon it will end up cheaper paying for new housing a strobes for your canon.

As for it is the best wide angle lens for UW.. from the nikon range the 13mm f/5.6 AI-s def kicks it but if you have got that sort of money to spend (saw one sell for £25,000) then hell, all of this is just plain academic as the chances are you would have all the stuff you wanted!!

The Nikonos V with 15mm lens and Fuji Velvia is easily capable of producing BETTER UW photos than digital. The 15mm was designed for UW and film still has a wider range of tones. It doesn't take that long to learn IF you take the time to learn exposure and depth of field principles. Get a good strobe(s), properly set hyper-focal for conditions, and you can concentrate on composition with the smallest, most agile rig on the boat.

I respectfully disagree. I think the latest sensors have far greater DR than RVP and IQ is mute. I don’t know if anyone can do Cebies, so you will end up scanning your slides anyway. I love the old Fuji and I still have my V & 15 mm. Bite the bullet and go digital.

Bob

The Nikonos V with 15mm lens and Fuji Velvia is easily capable of producing BETTER UW photos than digital. The 15mm was designed for UW and film still has a wider range of tones. It doesn't take that long to learn IF you take the time to learn exposure and depth of field principles. Get a good strobe(s), properly set hyper-focal for conditions, and you can concentrate on composition with the smallest, most agile rig on the boat.

Not sure that I agree with that in this day and age but maybe if you look at quality/size you can make an argument. I can use the Nikonos 15 with my Sony Nex-5 system at very nearly the same size as a Nikonos V but I get the ability to see what I am going to get before I press the button. And I get more than 36 shots per dive.

In any case, to the OP; you will learn 10 x faster with 10x less cost per pic with digital than with film in my opinion.

Bill