Fujifilm X-T3 + Nauticam NA-XT3 experience

Managed to get out on a night dive last night, first outing with the 45º viewfinder. Won't lie, it takes a bit of getting used to!

Few sample shots from my outing. I'm still nowhere good a photographer as my gear should allow me to become

I was trying to avoid making any camera adjustments, focusing on, well, focus . I pretty much left ISO at 250, SS at 1/250 and aperture at f/9.  All shot with my 2x Z240's on manual mode, each with a -0.5 diffuser, and power output between the 4 and 5.6 markers, using flash output to adjust exposure.

I thought I was giving myself a bit of a DoF margin at f/9, but missed the sweet focus spot a fair bit.

Happy to take critique from anyone willing to offer

Yep, 45-degree finders are a bit of getting used to.

You have some nice compositions. I'd suggest that you might aim to use the 45-finder to its very best by shooting UP rather than as most pics here show, down. This will make a huge difference and allow you to isolate the critters away from their (sometimes cluttered) background.

I'd suggest you look for opportnities to be able to shoot up quite deliberately. Wait for the subject to move, find a patch of reef etc which allows you to be lower than your subject. So shoot Up! It's what 45-degree finders are for 

2 minutes ago, TimG said:

I'd suggest you look for opportnities to be able to shoot up quite deliberately. Wait for the subject to move, find a patch of reef etc which allows you to be lower than your subject. So shoot Up! It's what 45-degree finders are for 

Yeah I know! I was certainly trying. Maybe just not patient enough   It was a pier dive, and although there is often a fair bit of life hanging around the pylons, on this dive all the critters seemed to be down in the sand. The crab, squid and seahorse were pretty much taken with my camera sitting on the sea bed - there was no way I'd have been able to get those shots without the 45º.

1 minute ago, froop said:

Yeah I know! I was certainly trying. Maybe just not patient enough   It was a pier dive, and although there is often a fair bit of life hanging around the pylons, on this dive all the critters seemed to be down in the sand. The crab, squid and seahorse were pretty much taken with my camera sitting on the sea bed - there was no way I'd have been able to get those shots without the 45º.

LOL, understood! I like offering counsels of perfection 

Just now, TimG said:

there was no way I'd have been able to get those shots without the 45º.

Yep, that's the beauty of them.

Last weekend I left the macro behind and took out the 15-45 with the WWL-C instead. Even though the dive site was more of a small critter site than one that called for wide angle, it's not like I'm taking out an 8mm fish eye... 

Anyway, I was happily surprised by the versatility of this combo, even managing a decent shot of a nudibranch at 45mm.

At 15mm, there is a quite a lot of vignetting, to the point of seeing the edges of the dome in the corners, so for the wide shots I definitely need to allow for some cropping. I've included the out-of-the-camera version of the first pic to illustrate.

The port charts say no vignetting from 16mm with the WWL-C.  SOme nice pics there - what's the dive site?

1 minute ago, ChrisRoss said:

The port charts say no vignetting from 16mm with the WWL-C.  SOme nice pics there - what's the dive site?

The port chart for Fuji actually says not vignetting at 15mm. The 15-45mm is actually not a favourite lens of mine. The only reason I have it is because it came as the kit lens with a Fuji X-A7 that I bought as a walk-around body. It has two very frustrating quirks with the zoom - one is that it is a motorised zoom - the zoom ring is a spring-loaded control - the further you twist it the fast it zooms. That doesn't transfer very well to the housing zoom control as I can't just let it go to stop zooming.

The second quirk is that when the camera goes into playback mode, the lens retracts first before playback mode starts. Then when the camera exits playback, the lens doesn't remember where it was zoomed to. And those two quirks together are a PITA!

Dive site is Blairgowrie Yacht Club.

I'm constantly deflated when I compare my photos to some of the awesome underwater pics that I see other people posting. I like to think that I'm slowly working my way up from "crap" to "awesome" via "nice"

54 minutes ago, froop said:

I like to think that I'm slowly working my way up from "crap" to "awesome" via "nice"

A brilliant way of looking at it - and, frankly, I think we have pretty much all been there...... Just keep going and you'll get there (wherever "there" is) 

12 hours ago, froop said:

The port chart for Fuji actually says not vignetting at 15mm.

I'm constantly deflated when I compare my photos to some of the awesome underwater pics that I see other people posting. I like to think that I'm slowly working my way up from "crap" to "awesome" via "nice"

 

I looked at the WWL-C chart here and it says 16-45mm and it appears your experience shows that is correct.  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y0HQfXjsUhLc0g-qSwneZxegDdW9bGHX/view  

The behaviour of the 15-45 doesn't sound great - there's no way to assign zoom to a button to get it working better ??

It takes a bit of time to get used framing and all the technical issues UW all I can say is just keep shooting.

2 hours ago, ChrisRoss said:

I looked at the WWL-C chart here and it says 16-45mm and it appears your experience shows that is correct.  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y0HQfXjsUhLc0g-qSwneZxegDdW9bGHX/view  

The behaviour of the 15-45 doesn't sound great - there's no way to assign zoom to a button to get it working better ??

It takes a bit of time to get used framing and all the technical issues UW all I can say is just keep shooting.

And I just checked the nauticam website again (https://www.nauticam.com/pages/n100-fujifilm-xt3-and-xh1-port-chart) and the port chart (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EZCtRd9_efQO4hlPsN7IawKHPme1IwQ4) is now labelled Rev 21.6 (June 2021?) and shows the zoom range as 18-45mm.

The lens "quirks" I think are a result of a bug in how it operates on the X-T3. It doesn't do that with my Fujifilm X-A7. The playback hassle is reduced by increasing the instant playback duration, so it's not that often I need to hit the play button. Although it would certainly be better if it didn't do that!

Certainly sounds difficult to use - the older 16-50 kit lens seems like it might be a better option but you would be on your own working out which port to use with it. 

Well after a yet another lockdown down here in Melbourne, I finally managed to get out diving again, this time at Flinders Pier in search of the resident smooth ray and some weedy sea dragons (hint: not too hard to find there!)

Again with the 16-45mm + WWL-C.

I made a small tweak with my flash set up - last time I took out my camera in (for a night dive) the Nauticam hotshoe adapter managed to get slightly dislodged someone in transit from my home to the water. The adapter doesn't have any positive locking mechanism, so this time out I used the Fujifilm EF-X8 mini hot-shoe mount flash, set it to (M)anual and dialed the exposure as low as possible. This still triggers the strobes, but minimises battery drain. And it has a positive lock so no chance of being dislodged.

The ray snuck up on me while I was fiddling with switching settings from video to still, so managed to snap one quick pic with whatever my camera settings were before flicking back for a couple of seconds of video.

Hi,

Been using Fujifilm X-T3 with XF10-24 F4 for wide angle & XF80 for macro.

Lights setup: dual INON-Z330.

Attached a couple of pics.

Has been a while since I've posted any pics here on wetpixel, so here's a sampling of a local(ish) shore dive from Sunday night. A toasty 12ºC in the water!

Fujifilm XF-80mm f/2.8 macro

2x Inon Z-240

2x Kraken 3500S+ (Focus lights and GoPro video lights)