using a shorter lens in a standard port

I've just introduced myself in the new members section and I'd like to start picking the brains of all you knowledgeable people.

I use an Oly E-PL with the 14-42mm kit lens in the standard PT-EP01 housing. Works fine. Works even better now my father-in-law splurged on an Inon Z240 for my birthday (yay)!

I wonder if a prime lens that's a couple of centimeters shorter than the kit lens, specifically the sigma 60mm, would work with the standard port that is designed for a lens that is about 8,5 cm long, as the kit lens is.

Would this cause vignetting?

Has anyone tried this?

You should be safe. I'm using a 25mm Oly lens in the port for the 60mm macro. The 25mm is much shorter AND wider but does not vignette. In your case you going to a lens with longer focal length so even less change of vignetting. However, you may want to rethink if the sigma 60mm is a good choice for underwater use as it can't focus closer than 50cm.

Bart

Thanks for the info, Bart.

I'm not really considering the sigma lens for macro shooting, but I'm wondering if the longer focal length might allow me to stay farther away from the fish, so as to capture a more natural behaviour. With a single focus lens I won't be tempted to zoom in and out (I tend to get a bit wishy-washy when framing).

yes you can stay away a bit farther but at the cost of image quality, even in clear tropical waters. Moreover, at the same distance, you only get about 1.5x magnification compared to the 14-42 set to its longest focal length. I've thought about getting a stronger telelens myself to stay away farther from shy small critters and recording natural behavior was more important than image quality. However, in many cases patience, good buoyancy and breath control allows you to get a lot closer than you might expect. I think there can be good cases for a stronger telelens but it can also become a crutch to compensate for inability to get close and take away the stimulation to improve your skills.

Bart

You touch upon the key factors here.

I may be a novice photographer, but I am certainly not a novice diver. Even with more than a thousand dives under my weight belt and having taught many classes on peak performance buoyancy, I was amazed at the level of difficulty involved in keeping trim, pitch and yaw and position under control whilst manipulating an unwieldy, slightly buoyant box, getting my brain to compensate for the different refractions between eyes, camera display, lens and subject, let alone calculating for lighting, exposure, shutter time and whatnot.

Adding an electronic viewfinder to my camera was one of the best decisions I made in terms of underwater photography, since it eliminates a lot of lining-up issues.

Here in Belgium and Holland, focal length is less of an issue than it is in tropical waters. Wide angle is mostly impossible due to bad visibility, and most subjects are more or less indifferent to divers (think lobsters, crabs, nudibranch). Getting close is generally not where the difficulty lies.

Tropical waters are another kettle of fish (excuse the crappy pun, please) altogether. On holiday, there are not only photographical issues to consider, there is also the buddy (aka my wife) to consider, since her navigational skills are somewhat less than nonexistent. There is the whole diving in a group with a guide thing (though most guides keep an eye on photographers) and there is the abundance of subjects and possible approaches.

So I'll leave off the lens experiments for a while and focus on mastering my existing kit and on bettering my photo skills. Maybe in a year or two I'll have gotten to a point where I'm ready to start sharing the results with the world.

I would use the zoom lens to get wide to telephoto and add a diopter such as Subsee +10 or Nauticam CMC to get decent macro too. 90% of my photography is with the Oly 60mm macro and you can pull away slightly to get bigger fish portraits. The image quality drops with every cm you move away from your subjects so get as close as you can. At a push the 60mm macro is a tele lens too as long as you leave the focus switch in the .19 to infinity.

We always use a private dive guide when we go overseas. We tell him what we want to photograph, he selects best site to find subjects and waits as long as we take pictures or finds new subjects. Never dive as part of a group if you are taking photos as you don't get time to get your shots and you annoy the other divers and the guide. The little extra for a personnal guide is one of the best investments for dive photo holidays.

If Belgium and the Netherlands are your home turf then getting close is even more important, it is where I learned to dive in the 80s. I think you made a wise decision to focus on getting better with what you have. I haven't used the 14-42mm but of the many aspects that determine final image quality, my experience is that the lens quality is normally not the biggest factor (unless you are already really good at everything else). And you should be able to get spectacular images with it. Other lens properties such as ability to focus close, speed and accuracy of autofocus are more important so perhaps think about a true macro lens down the road.

I agree with Griff that photography, and especially learning it, works a lot better with a dedicated guide or no guide at all. With your 1000+ dives in cold murky waters you really don't need a dive guide. Just go to the Red Sea and get an unlimited shore diving package. I just returned from Marsa Abu Dabbab where you have reefs, seagrass/muck and a pretty beach. The diving can't get any easier and navigational skills are not needed for the reef dives. Just swim out and back. To train compass navigation the seagrass is very good. Without clear visual cues it is easy to get lost as you turn around a few times but heading home is as simple as going West. I found it a good learning experience to try to get out as close to the dive shop as possible but if you hit the beach 100m away, no harm done.

Bart

Getting around on holiday dive sites is not that much of a problem, really. We usually revisit places we know by heart and the staff know us and let us dive apart from the group. But there still is a difference between doing a quiet little solo dive looking around and ferreting out stuff and going out on a day boat. Still it's not much more than reef on the left hand side or reef on the right hand side. The biggest adjustment is for my wife: until I started mucking about with a camera, she was the one who went and poked her nose in all kinds of nooks and crannies whilst relying on me to keep an eye on her.

Now the fin is on the other foot. But she doesn't mind, really. Besides, after about four hundred dives, it's high time she learned to navigate

In five weeks we're off to Port Ghalib again and the guides were actually excited that I finally had given in and got a camera last time we went. Most of them are quite serious about photograpy themselves. The point I was trying to make - not so very well, I presume - is that underwater photography, if you try to approach it seriously, is one of the harder skills to master in diving. Sure, I wasn't bumping into reefs and I didn't cause any fire coral avalanches, but looking at my dive profiles, I was a bit shocked at how much more of a sawtooth profile I had been diving. Before the camera, I dove textbook profiles, two months ago, in clear subtropical waters I was diving with up-and-down peaks and valleys of about a meter on the first six or so dives.

I really appreciate you guys feeding me tips. There's more than enough to learn and experiment with in Egypt and here at home I can always rent the Oly 60mm lens for a weekend to play around with in Zeeland.

And there's a magnificent lake in the Port of Antwerp with lots of plants and juvenile fish that usually has very good viz in high summer (well... five meters... that's crystal clear for us) where I can go and practice.