D70 Cozumel pictures

Hello Everyone!

My wife and I recently returned from a wonderful trip to Cozumel where we stayed at the Presidente and dove with ScubaDu.. It was my first trip with a newly housed D70 in Ikelite housing with dual ds125 strobes and one manual controller. My wife was shooting with my Olympus 5050 and Inon setup, which still produces excellent images.

The new D70 setup worked well. The housing is a little bouyant toward the front of the dome port for the 18-70mm zoom lens, which tends to cause the nose to point up and torque your wrists.. Ike would say this is good because it keeps your camera pointed up toward the heavens for better photography! There is a weight that Ikelite provides for the housing but the weight really needs to be closer to the front of port to keep the camera level. All controls worked well underwater. The manual strobe controller was to my left and the fill strobe was set to ½ to ¼ power. I added a lever to the zoom knob for easier finger tip control. Something to extend the eyepiece would be nice…mask and regulator did not like synch cord bulkhead….. I used the same dome port for the 18-70 zoom lens and the 60 mm micro lens… The port for the 10.5 FE is compact and does not come with a shade. All this equipment, accessories and 17inch G4 notebook fits into a Tamrac backpack and in the overhead compartment of an Airbus 319.

Lenses used were the 10.5mm FE, 60 mm micro and 18-70mm zoom. The 10.5 FE focused extremely fast and produced some really sharp results. The 60mm micro focusing was slower but proved to be the sharpest lens of the group. The 18-70mm zoom is a nice general purpose lens, focus was fast but did not produce the sharpest images..

All the pictures were taken in the NEF+JPG mode. I highly recommend downloading NEF files with NIKON’s Capture editor software. The Adobe Photoshop CS plugin does not generate good results. I have a previous thread on wetpixel about this. Even with A LOT of tweaking in the PS CS RAW converter it is (in my opinion) impossible to achieve the color balance that results from using NIKON’s software. Once loaded into NIKON Capture I saved as TIFF file and adjusted levels, removed particulate and sharpened with unsharp mask. All pictures were then converted back to 8bit sRGB profile and resized for the web. I do not use the “save for web” feature in photoshop anymore as this tends to make my images look less saturated.

The two galleries from Bonaire and Truk were all taken with Olympus and Inon equipment. The Cozumel gallery is Nikon D70 and Ikelite. The pictures are 800x? and less than 500K in size.. Download speed a little slow…..

http://homepage.mac.com/mikepalasz/PhotoAlbum9.html

Enjoy!

Michael and Keri Palasz

Wonderful pictures! I really enjoyed them.

I've just bought a D70 and can't wait got get it in the housing (Ikelite) and underwater. It’s nice to see pictures with the same lenses as I'm going to use. Wish I could go to sleep and note wake up until 14/9 again. Going back to work in Hurghada and that will be my first chance to try it properly.

This is a truley amazing image:

Michael, that's an impressive series of shots especially considering it's your first time out with a new rig....way to go!

I'm impressed with the lighting on the 10.5 shots...very good coverage and sharp edges...Cozumel is a perfect place for full color WA's....I also liked the diver silhouette and sharp 60mm shots

I got a big kick out of the 10.5 reef scene that was shot at 1/2000 with full strobe coverage...no other DSLR can do that! :shock:

Karl

Thanks Karl -

Have you noticed anything funny with the shutter speed on D70? There were 2 instances where speed would not go past 1/500th.. I wasn't sure if it had something to do with manual controller / strobes/ lens/ ???

M.

My experience underwater with the D70's has been rather limited to date, but I haven't noticed anything....as long as I'm shooting manual, I can pick strobe speeds well beyond 1/500....1/2000 is as high as I've ever tried and it worked

Did you tend to shoot in AF-S or AF-C the most? Single or dynamic focus?

You did a nice job with your ambient light exposures...nice blues

Karl

Hey Karl -

Everthing was shot AF-S and single focus.. I used dynamic for a few shots but changed to single early on... does the exif data show this.. i cant seem to find...unless it is under metering and "dynamic" is the same as "pattern".

Photoshop exif data is a little bit different than what Nikon capture shows..

Did you read the info on using Nikon capture instead of Photoshop plug in?

M.

Yes, to my chagrin, as I've gotten very comfortable with CS....I've compared Capture and CS on topside RAW shots and haven't really noticed that much difference.....I've never tried Capture on my limited (fresh water only to date) underwater RAW shots

We're preparing for a 17 day trip to Indonesia early next month, so I will have a lot of time to try out both during surface intervals at Wakatobi

Karl

starbuck, thank you sooo much for posting these images. I'm really excited by what I see from the D70. Beautiful blues and that Parrot shot is outstanding. Although I haven't gotten mine in the water yet, you've really lit a fire. Thanks.

Karl, I leave Sept. 2nd. You?

Rand

Hi Rand....Kimberly and I leave Sept.4.....can't wait.....seeing these shots from Mike and earlier from Jim really give me a lot of hope for a successful photo trip....we have so much new equipment, including new laptop to get used to....that's half of the fun though....we'll sure miss seeing everyone in Little Cayman, but Wakatobi isn't a bad place to be

BTW, nice choice on the Subal....I've got viewfinder envy I know you will love using the D70...the controls are very intuitive....I'll keep my fingers crossed that it gets to you in time for your trip :shock:

Karl

That viewfinder kind of sealed it for me. You'll be missed!

Rand

Those are fabulous, for sure the best I've seen yet from the D-70! Those 10.5 mm shots are certainly very impressive. Thanks for posting.

Starbuck, Nice shots. I noticed that you had one with the shutter speed dialed all the way up to 1/2000. Did you noticed if your strobe power is reduced at such high speeds. I would expect at least a couple of stops fall off. BTW, what strobes are you using?

Great shots...echo all the statements. can't wait to baptixe my d70 as well..

Tony

Hi Everyone and thanks for all the favorable comments!

Herb, the fast shutter speed wide angle was a mistake.. I was trying to shoot sunbursts and forgot to adjust shutter speed. My right strobe was always set at 1/2 to 1/4 power and the left strobe was never set at full on the manual controller.. I left at about 1/2 as well. Flying by the reef, as it typical in Cozumel, I got one shot of this and it was a little underexposed. Nikon Capture helped with the exposure. I'm using two ds125 strobes presently. They worked well. If you are using the manual controller and dont have the dial set properly the strobe will beep non-stop! I also origianally had the LCD display set at +2...this was a mistake..leave at 0 and the exposure you see in LCD will match what you see after downloading pictures...

Hope all this helps for the new d70 users..

M.

As D70 owner that plan to take it u/w soon (need only the approval of the management 8) ) your post was very helpful and interesting.

Good shots!

It is fascinating to read that the D70 will flash synch at shutter speeds up to at least 1/2000th. This is a real advance for DSLRs in controlling ambient light in exposures.

Clearly the d70 is using an electronic rather than mechanical shutter at these speeds. Very interesting,

Can you shoot rear curtain flash synch at these shutter speeds?

Alex

Hey Alex -

Im not sure about the rear curtain synch..have not tried that. What effect would rear curtain sync give?

M.

Can you shoot rear curtain flash synch at these shutter speeds?

 

Alex

I don't think it makes a difference at 1/2000s since the strobe duration is longer than the shutter speed. My estimate from some of the strobe test results is the DS-150 takes around 1/250s for a full dump and the Inon Z-200 takes about 1/500s.

Starbuck, how do you get the strobes to fire? Not getting my housing in for a bit but I couldn't find a setting similar to the 5050 that sends the signal to the shoe. I'm assuming the internal strobe doesn't fire. So how did you set up the camera?

Rand