I recently bought a sony a6400 with the 16-50mm kitlens in a nauticam housing. I'm really happy with this upgrade (had a sony rx100m2 before that). I am a bit disappointed though in the minimum focus distance of the kitlens. My main subject/interest is fish portraits and some smaller fish/bigger invertabrates and I feel I miss quite some opportunities.
So I considering on getting the Sony E 30mm f/3.5 Macro Lenswhich I hear is great for fish portraits and can be used with the same port on a nauticam housing. The question I have: would putting a wide angle wetlens on this combo get you good/acceptable results? I do realise nothing beats a dedicated setup. I would concentrate on fish, but it would be nice to have the option to take a more wide angle environment shot or a close focus wide angle if the opportunity presents itselves on the same dive. I have an Inon UWL-H100. What do you guys think?
Cheers,
Jan
Don't know why you would need the 30 M when the 16-50 works with both wide wet lenses like WWL-1/1B plus WWL-C and closeup lenses like CMC-1/2 and SMC-1/2 or any of the many other 67mm threaded C/U lenses.
No reason it wouldn't work as long as the port is a good fit, the lens needs to be close enough to the port glass to not vignette. This guy:
uses the 30mm macro on a Sony A series and gets nice results for fish portrait work with it. If you already have the UWL-H100 give it a try, the lens is designed for 28mm equivalent lenses so gets its maximum field of view at 18mm on an APS-C camera, so you would only get about the equivalent of a full frame 28mm lens when using it - wider but not incredibly wide. The only unknown is how it performs optically the INON lens is not designed for zoom through so optically may not be great. It would be like having 30mm and 19mm available on the 16-50 lens.
As for close focus performance, the 30mm is a 1:1 macro lens but gets to 1:1 only a few mm away from the front element. This means you can probably comfortably use 1:2 and even that is pretty close in.
