Looking for lens advice from Sony users

In my continuing quest to upgrade my UW gear (TG-5), one option I have is to use my Sony A7C. I bought this mainly for land-based stills with my legacy MF lenses, plus as a video b-roll camera, so I have a few AF lenses for it -  the 28mm FE with both the 20mm and fisheye adapters, a cheap tele-zoom and the Zeiss 35mm 2.8.

What I'd like is either a half decent macro lens or advice on using a diopter for one of my current lenses. Also a standard 24-70 for video work. I'm not looking for high-end glass, the FE range or third party is good enough. Maybe a kit lens with a diopter on a flip fitting might be a good start?

What are your most used lenses for macro stills and general video work? Bear in mind this is a FF sensor but with the ability to shoot aps-c.

TIA

There is a whole discussion on the A7C with the 28-60mm lens + wet lenses, which seems to be the preferred option. With a Nauticam CMC or similar it will give you half decent macro and as a standard lens I assume it's decent for video too. 

View archived post in: Sony A7C + 28-60 kit lens + WWL vs Olympus OM-D E-M1 II + 14-42 + WWL

You'll find most of the info here

These are two reviews you may want to start with. The full reviews are in the back issue section at uwpmag.com top of the home page. All are free PDF downloads.

On 5/19/2021 at 1:59 AM, hyp said:

There is a whole discussion on the A7C with the 28-60mm lens + wet lenses, which seems to be the preferred option. With a Nauticam CMC or similar it will give you half decent macro and as a standard lens I assume it's decent for video too. 

I missed this. Thanks for the heads up.

8 hours ago, Phil Rudin said:

These are two reviews you may want to start with. The full reviews are in the back issue section at uwpmag.com top of the home page. All are free PDF downloads

Thanks for this, Phil. I'm aware that Rokinon brought out the AF versions of some of their wide-angles and they are reasonably priced too. I wonder how easy it would be to use the 28mm FE with the fish-eye adapter instead. The 28-60 is a neat and inexpensive lens. It only opens up to f/4 but this isn't an issue with good low-light performance and the fact I wouldn't open up this much anyway. It's a shame it's not a 24-70 though! Anyway, I'll grab that PDF.

By the way, my interest in the A7C has been roused by the fact that Ikelite are currently testing their prototype housing for the A7C. The Nauticam version is WAY outside my budget but nice to see housing manufacturers are taking the A7C seriously. I love it as a stills camera for land-based stuff. It's a really underrated camera.

Remember that in order to use the 28-60 you will need a port that is short enough and many manufacturers don't offer this. Make sure that a suitable port is available for your system.

Indeed. Ports is something I've not yet got my head around as I've not used them yet. Perhaps I'll get in touch with Ikelite and see what they recommend.

I recall seeing questions around this before in connection with using WWL with Ikelite housings, they might need to produce a different port to allow use with a wet wide lens as they only produce one flat port currently as far as I know.  It really needs to be a good fit as if the port is too long  vignetting will be problem.  Finding out how well lenses fit tends to be a bit of a guessing game sometimes.

Ikelite actually has two port systems the DLM system which has two flat ports with 67mm threads and the DL system which has a single flat port with 67mm threads (The FL port system has been retired). The DL system is for the larger housings while DLM is for systems like the A6000 series. My guess is that while the A7C is small enough to fit the mold for DLM ports those ports may be too small for large FF Sony lenses. Nauticam uses an N100 port for the 28-60 but for larger lenses like the 12-24mm the N100 to N120 adapter needs to be used. 

Also while a 24-70 kit lens would have been nice it would not work with the WWL-1 or the WACP which were both designed for 28mm.

Another excellent lens choice for the A7C is the Tamron 17-38mm F/2.8 with ports starting at 180mm.  

Thank you both, Chris and Phil. That's useful info re the ports, and I appreciate the Tamron recommendation too. In anticipation I have been window shopping for lenses.

My main issue is that I want to do a combination of macro and video and obviously would like to find a lens and maybe diopter that would allow me to do both on one dive. Perhaps this is too much of a compromise? I'm not yet at that stage where I would go for a dive specifically for one or the other. I'm not so interested in super-wide angle stuff atm. IDK, any thoughts on that?