Underwater Camera/housing advice

Hi everyone. I used to have Canon PowerShot 1 in Ikelite housing with DS 50 strobe. That camera had L quality lens.  It took amazing photos and was not too large. Currently, I have Canon EOS R with RF 14-35 F4 L lens. I was thinking of getting an Ikelite housing for it. That thing is 4.7 lbs. I would only need 1 extension for RF 14-35 and thinking of getting a compact dome.  My issue, besides the price, is the sheer size of this housing. The transportation part, the bucket on the boat, the actual diving with this thing. I plan to use it for photography (I shoot RAW) and have my Go Pro Hero 9 attached on top for video.

Are there any alternatives or will I be disappointed with a compact camera? I was thinking about Sony RX 100 VII, but that thing is $1300 and by the time I add the housing , dome, etc, I will be over than what I would spend for a housing for a camera and lens that I actually own. I was also thinking of not getting the strobes, but use my existing Big Blue Black Molly V: 2600 video lights ( I have 2 of them). I know they are not for photo, but I suppose they will do the job.I also have Canon Care Pack Plus for the RF 14-35 F4 L lens and EOS R. It covers water damage for the next 4 years, an added bonus.

I will be in Cozumel for the whole month this July and Go Pro Hero 9 RAW file photo quality just does not cut it.

Something I just thought off- Canon will be releasing R7 and R10 (APS-C). If I buy Canon R 10, it is smaller than Canon EOS R and I can use my existing RF 14-35 F4L glass on it. I suppose the Ikelite housing will be smaller and lighter and cheaper than the one for Canon EOS R. The issue is, I won't be able to take it on this trip since Ikelite did not make a housing for it yet. I think that it is not smart to commit to Canon EOS R housing at this moment and it might be prudent to wait and see how the new R7 and R10 perform underwater. Being able to use my L glass with them (RF 14-35) is a huge bonus.  Canon R10 is about the same size as Canon SL3 and that housing is much smaller, lighter and cheaper than the housing for Canon EOS R

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

Hi Deckard, interesting challenge you have. I am thinking of stopping with photographing with my old d300 and was searching for a more compact solution. I hear a lot of good things about the Rx100. 

In the past (2004) I had the cybershot and was very satisfied with it but I changed to my nikon d200 and later d300 with which I made nice pictures. I got stuck on the possibilities with low light which made focusing with super macro difficult.

With these size camera's it is very important to invest in quality housing. I am fan of seacam. In those period's I had never issues while some of my friends had ikelite or Olympus housings which actually are not made to last long.

To give you some advice. If you love Canon.... wait for it.  If you want to try something else..... the Sony rx100 has great possibilities. Good luck with choosing. I currently share the same feelings in choosing a good successor.

Thank you for the response. Sony RX 100 VII came out 3 years ago. (Correction - 4 years ago ! ) Paying $1300 (full price) for it now is criminal. Plus, batteries, carrying case, etc, I have no use for this camera above ground. Also, who needs 200mm underwater. All it does is creates distortion.  When I had my Canon PowerShot Pro1, I did not use zoom at all. I just got close to the subjects. That PowerShot Pro1 had  "L" glass. This is the only "L" glass point and shoot Canon ever made to my knowledge. Since I own RF 14-35 F4L, it will be hard to beat this glass ($1700). I think if I wait for Canon R10, it will be worth it. Another point for Canon EOS R - it will be obsolete soon. I bought it for $1600 new. I could not justify paying $3900 for R5 since I do not care about video or wedding photography and I do not work on Wall st.

If Sony came out with a new compact for $1300, that is another story. They must have a refresh soon. Once you buy a housing for a camera , you are stuck with it for a very long time.

By the way, Canon PowerShot Pro 1 (2004)  - 8 megapixel RAW files are way better than Go Pro Hero 9 RAW files. I spoke with Ikelite on the phone last week and they suggested Canon SL3 for the price and size/quality. This is before R7 and R10 were announced. I think my logic makes sense. Keep EOS R for landscape photography. Buy R10 for underwater and If i want to pack even lighter,  I can take that camera on the plane instead of EOS R when not diving.

Thank you and good luck to you too

2 hours ago, Deckard said:

I would only need 1 extension for RF 14-35 and thinking of getting a compact dome.

Compact domes sort of work with fisheye lenses, but not so much with rectilinear UWA. With the 14-35mm lens, you need at least a 180mm dome, and preferably 230mm or bigger in order to achieve acceptable sharpness across the frame. With a 100mm compact dome, it might not even focus reliably.

11 minutes ago, Deckard said:

Also, who needs 200mm underwater. All it does is creates distortion.

With close-up lenses, it gives you tremendous macro capability. However, if you don't shoot macro, you may want to consider Sony RX100M5A (M6 electronics in an M5 body) or ZV-1 (this trades EVF and flash for a hot shoe, so it can trigger strobes without depending on the built-in flashes recycle time). If you primarily shoot wide-angle, don't forget a wide-angle lens (Nauticam WWL-C, AOI/Fantasea UWL-09, Kraken/Weefine KRL-01/WFL-01, etc).

2 hours ago, Deckard said:

I was also thinking of not getting the strobes, but use my existing Big Blue Black Molly V: 2600 video lights ( I have 2 of them). I know they are not for photo, but I suppose they will do the job

Even the smallest, cheapest strobes like AOI Q1 will be several orders of magnitude more powerful than LED lights. I started with a pair of Archon 5400 lumen lights, and switching to very basic strobes (SeaFrogs ST-100) was a night and day difference - a much bigger difference than I got from upgrading to a pair of top-end strobes (Retra Pro) several years down the line.

The 14-35 with a compact dome assuming it will focus will have soft to very soft corners between 14- and about 20-22mm or so, as mentioned you need a large dome to get sharp corners and even Ikelite's largest dome is 8" which is a little on the small side for the widest settings.  Certainly you could use it and it might be fine for large animals in open water where the corners are blue water, but for reef scenics even with the 8" dome you would need to stop down to f13 range to get the corners reasonable and eben then probably not completely sharp.

The video light won't be strong enough they need to be bright enough to overpower ambient light.  Your video lights are only 2600 lumens, even 14,000 lumen video light are 6 stops less bright than UW strobes at full power and the fact you would be stopping down a lot makes it even more of a problem. 

The EOS-R10 may or may not use a compact housing like the SL-3.  The issue with the compact SL-3 housing is that it uses a different line of domes and requires a zoom knob on the dome itself which means the biggest dome you can get is the 6" dome which limits your lens choices.

Costs of UW scale with sensor size, there are lots of alternatives with smaller sensor sizes available.  For example the Olympus EPL-10 with the AOI housing offered by backscatter.  The RX-100 series are also very good as are the G7X series, they have 1" sensors which are a 2.7x crop - twice the area of the 2/3" sensor in your powershot and the olympus m43 sensor is 2x the area of the 1" sensors in RX100.

I would suggest thinking about what you like to shoot, and looking at lenses that will be good for that and working backwards towards a camera body.  On the strobe side, I would definitely plan on using strobes - that's the single biggest thing that will improve your images UW.

Thank you very much for all of the responses. I miss my Canon PowerShot Pro 1. It had L glass (In the end , it is all about the quality of the glass, is not it? ).  Powershot Pro1 started to malfunction (camera, not the housing) in 2011 in New Zealand and completely broke in New Caledonia on the same trip.

When I compare RAW files from Canon PowerShot Pro1 and RAW files from GoPro 9, it is a night and day. I know that GoPro 9 is not a benchmark, but still...Powershot is from 2004.

Sony RX 100 Vii is $1300 for a 4 year old camera. I am not buying that, when refresh is long overdue. I called Ikelite again and they recommended Canon SL3 (again) with Tokina 10-17 Fisheye. It will cost me the same amount of money to buy all that or put my EOS R and 14-35 in a housing with an extension.

Mike at Ikelite also said that he thinks that R10 will have a large housing because of RF mount. Yes, the corners with RF 14-35 will be a problem and I was thinking of 6 inch dome. I just don't want to dive with a huge housing and a monstrous 8 inch dome. If I lived in Florida or Hawaii, I can justify it. But for me , since I live in NYC, every diving trip I take is on the plane.

I don't have a dive buddy anymore (my dad was my dive buddy , but he died ) and this is not a National Geographic trip. People will be dropping their GoPros and whatnot into the same bucket with me.

A famous videographer on Youtube said "something must be said about a full frame sensor, and he brought back the red colors from 30 meters below with no flash". I don't know how true or not this is. I think it makes sense for me to wait for the R10 housing to finally come out (For next year) and maybe Sony will release RX -100 VIII?  Did anyone try Tokina 10-17 with SL3? Thanks a lot again !

Honestly, I am really against paying top dollar (same as price on release date) for cameras that came out 3 or more years ago. Besides, manufacturers might release refreshes of those cameras and I will be stuck with the same housing until it breaks.

4 hours ago, Deckard said:

Thank you very much for all of the responses. I miss my Canon PowerShot Pro 1. It had L glass (In the end , it is all about the quality of the glass, is not it? ).  Powershot Pro1 started to malfunction (camera, not the housing) in 2011 in New Zealand and completely broke in New Caledonia on the same trip.

 

Actually it's not all about the glass for underwater work, photographing with a wide angle lens through a flat port introduces distortions - as I understand it the Pro 1 Ikelite housing had a flat port.   Even through a dome port there are abberations introduced through the water/glass/air interface of the dome and also the water itself limits image quality.  It's all about the the best compromise - some fine "L" quality lenses work great on land but rather poorly in a dome port.  The classic example is the Nikon 14-24 f2.8 lens.

I would not recommend the Sony RX100 VII - the 200mm lens is actually useful for macro work, but for wide angle causes problems getting it to work with a wet lens.  The Sony RX100V is a better option or a Canon G7X mkII.  Put that together with a wet lens like one of the INON lenses and you have a nice compact package.

Regarding your famous videographer - there is no red light left at 30m - it's physics and a full frame sensor can't help you. 

If you are determined to take your full frame I would look at using a fisheye lens, they work OK in smaller domes, for example a Sigma 15mm fisheye.  But if you are diving once a year - I would be looking in the classifieds on this forum - housings do not retain value well in the second hand market.

  For an example of what I am talking about with a wide angle rectilinear in a small dome, see this page, the shark shot is with a 17-40 lens at f8 in a 170mm dome.  You are talking about using a 14mm lens in a 150mm dome: https://uwaterphoto.com/?p=839

You can stop down which will help but even at f13-16 you will have similar corners at 14mm in a 150mm dome.

Thank you so much for your responses. I was actually thinking to use 20mm widest focal length for RF 14-35 F4L  using 8 inch compact dome. I do not mind shooting at 24mm as well if it helps with the corners.  I probably even use 35mm most of the time. Honestly, I only wanted 20mm prime  and 24mm  prime for Canon EOS R, but they do not make it. I also wanted only L glass. I like RF 14-35F4L for underwater because you need only 1 extension (unlike any other RF L series glass). RF 14-35F4L is the only RF L quality lens that requires only 1 extension to the housing.

I wonder if anyone actually used RF 14-35f4L with 8 inch compact dome. How is it when it comes to over/under shots? At what focal length the corners become acceptable or good? I wish I could see some JPG or RAW files to do some pixel peeping myself.

SL 3 with Tokina 10-17 sounds great, but I do not want to buy such an old lens and I have no use for SL3 above water. If B&H had any sale now on SL3 and Tokina or if Ikelite had any sale on it, that's a different story, but paying full price for all this for 17 year old lens...I am not thrilled. Another factor is that I use Capture One Pro and they do not have a lens profile for Tokina 10-17. I would have to learn Lightroom and pay for it or use Photoshop Lens RAW filter for every file to correct for distortion and vignetting. A lot of time and mechanical work wasted... Another point, I really do not like fisheye. I want to be able to take out my RF 14-35 from the housing and take some stunning landscape photos on EOS R full frame on the same vacation.

I think I will just not get anything this year and wait until Canon R10 housing comes out. Most likely , it will be huge, but it will put my mind at ease.

5 hours ago, Deckard said:

Thank you so much for your responses. I was actually thinking to use 20mm widest focal length for RF 14-35 F4L  using 8 inch compact dome. I do not mind shooting at 24mm as well if it helps with the corners.  I probably even use 35mm most of the time. Honestly, I only wanted 20mm prime  and 24mm  prime for Canon EOS R, but they do not make it. I also wanted only L glass. I like RF 14-35F4L for underwater because you need only 1 extension (unlike any other RF L series glass). RF 14-35F4L is the only RF L quality lens that requires only 1 extension to the housing.

I wonder if anyone actually used RF 14-35f4L with 8 inch compact dome. How is it when it comes to over/under shots? At what focal length the corners become acceptable or good? I wish I could see some JPG or RAW files to do some pixel peeping myself.

SL 3 with Tokina 10-17 sounds great, but I do not want to buy such an old lens and I have no use for SL3 above water. If B&H had any sale now on SL3 and Tokina or if Ikelite had any sale on it, that's a different story, but paying full price for all this for 17 year old lens...I am not thrilled. Another factor is that I use Capture One Pro and they do not have a lens profile for Tokina 10-17. I would have to learn Lightroom and pay for it or use Photoshop Lens RAW filter for every file to correct for distortion and vignetting. A lot of time and mechanical work wasted... Another point, I really do not like fisheye. I want to be able to take out my RF 14-35 from the housing and take some stunning landscape photos on EOS R full frame on the same vacation.

I think I will just not get anything this year and wait until Canon R10 housing comes out. Most likely , it will be huge, but it will put my mind at ease.

Deckard, you're trying to apply common wisdom from topside photography to the underwater world, where it really doesn't hold true.

• 20 or 24 mm focal length is not really wide angle underwater, even behind a dome. Water acts as a filter, and a terrible one at that. The more of it between you and your subject, the worse your image will be in terms of contrast and resolution and color. That's why we shoot wide angle with fisheye lenses. So we can get closer to the subject and reduce the amount of water between the camera and the subject. This factor alone will have a WAY bigger impact on the quality of your underwater images than any improvements in lens quality, sensor size or resolution. A 14-35mm lens on a APS-C crop body is not a good wide angle solution underwater. Period. (it's perfectly fine on a full frame camera, but as others have mentioned, really requires a 230mm dome port for best results)
• With an 8 inch dome, the 14-35 will be pretty terrible corner wise in the 14-20mm range -- i.e. where you want to be to shoot wide angle. It's not a great solution. If you want to stick to full frame and ikelite housings with their smaller domes, I'd recommend investing in a fisheye lens like the Canon 8-15mmF4 (L) fisheye zoom.
• Get over the thinking that old lenses are bad. There's limited correlation between how well a lens performs topside and how well it performs underwater behind a dome port. The Tokina 10-17 fisheye is a perfect example of this. It's a pretty crappy lens on land, but a great lens with a very versatile zoom range for wide angle photos underwater on APS-C cameras. Many people in fact pick APS-C cameras over full frame cameras for underwater use solely to get access to the Tokina 10-17, which has no full-frame equivalent.
• In general, there's very little difference in the size of underwater housings for APS-C and Full Frame cameras. Some M43 housings are smaller, but not all -- for instace, the new GH6 and Olympus E-M1X housings are just as big as full frame DSLR housings. I would expect the Ikelite housing for the Canon R7 and R10 to be similar in size to an EOS R housing
• The EOS-R is not a great camera these days. I personally would not invest in a housing for it. Or at least, buy it second hand...
• That said, a 3 year old camera is no bad thing for photography. The truth is sensor technology has largely plateaued in the last 10 years. The photos from a 10 year old Nikon D800 and a brand new Z9 are almost identical in terms of noise, dynamic range and resolution.  Even if Sony comes out with a new RX camera, odds are the sensor is going to be pretty much the same as the one in the RX I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII. The only improvements may come in autofocus tracking and on the video size. Not in image quality. 
• Finally, if you're doing one dive trip a year, trying to bring a full frame camera underwater in my view is a big waste of money and will not produce meaningfully better results than going with a much cheaper m4/3 solution like an Olympus E-PL10 in a Backscatter housing.  https://www.backscatter.com/Backscatter-Olympus-PEN-E-PL9-E-PL10-Underwater-Housing-UH-EPL10

5 hours ago, Deckard said:

Thank you so much for your responses. I was actually thinking to use 20mm widest focal length for RF 14-35 F4L  using 8 inch compact dome. I do not mind shooting at 24mm as well if it helps with the corners.  I probably even use 35mm most of the time. Honestly, I only wanted 20mm prime  and 24mm  prime for Canon EOS R, but they do not make it. I also wanted only L glass. I like RF 14-35F4L for underwater because you need only 1 extension (unlike any other RF L series glass). RF 14-35F4L is the only RF L quality lens that requires only 1 extension to the housing.

I wonder if anyone actually used RF 14-35f4L with 8 inch compact dome. How is it when it comes to over/under shots? At what focal length the corners become acceptable or good? I wish I could see some JPG or RAW files to do some pixel peeping myself.

SL 3 with Tokina 10-17 sounds great, but I do not want to buy such an old lens and I have no use for SL3 above water. If B&H had any sale now on SL3 and Tokina or if Ikelite had any sale on it, that's a different story, but paying full price for all this for 17 year old lens...I am not thrilled. Another factor is that I use Capture One Pro and they do not have a lens profile for Tokina 10-17. I would have to learn Lightroom and pay for it or use Photoshop Lens RAW filter for every file to correct for distortion and vignetting. A lot of time and mechanical work wasted... Another point, I really do not like fisheye. I want to be able to take out my RF 14-35 from the housing and take some stunning landscape photos on EOS R full frame on the same vacation.

I think I will just not get anything this year and wait until Canon R10 housing comes out. Most likely , it will be huge, but it will put my mind at ease.

I get that you like L glass, but all the things you are proposing to do with it degrade the images and you lose the quality you've just paid for.  The biggest issue is that none of these lenses have been designed with UW in mind, the fact is that some high quality lenses work well in domes underwater and others don't.  The UW photography market is very small and no-one has worked out a formula to explain why this happens.   I'm not saying the 14-35 won't work well UW, there are people who use it in 230mm domes and it seems to work well - just that the domes you are proposing are too small.  If you were happy to use a 230mm dome _ I would say go for it. 

The other side of using domes is getting the right extension - to work at its best the entrance pupil of the lens must be placed at the centre of curvature of the dome.   Many times housing manufacturers will compromise on that to offer a more compact dome for travel or to get closer for CFWA imaging.  Any time you don't place the dome at the right spot you introduce distortion and chromatic abberation.  - Which as an aside means you are probably better off turning off lens profiles for underwater.  The abberations you actually get are a combination of the land ones and those introduced by the dome.   You certainly don't need to correct distortion UW except maybe for wreck photos which is the only place you see straight lines UW.  There is absolutely no need to buy Lighroom to get lens profiles for the 10-17 to use underwater.  The 10-17 is an oddity - pretty poor reputation above water but produces excellent results for UW use. 

If you look at what Nauticam offers - they have developed the WWL and WACP which are specifically designed for use UW and they make use of old kit lenses like the Canon 28-70 f3.5-5.6 from 20 years ago.  The result is is sharp images from edge to edge that out perform L series  lenses like the 16-35 f2.8 behind a 230mm dome.   This to me demonstrates how much the image is degraded by the dome port optics - that a kit lens can out perform a L glass behind a dome and a properly sized and positioned dome at that.

Regarding focal length choice, wide angle is used underwater not to get sweeping views like in landscape photography - rather it is to get closer to the subject so you have less water between the port and the subject.  Underwater strobes have a range of around 1m - two at a stretch.  Water very quickly absorbs all of the red light from the strobe so you want to be very close.  This is why fisheyes are popular UW, they will focus on the dome and allow you to get really close to your subjects - they don't look like they have been taken with a fisheye if you frame them properly. 

If you want a small compact package without a big dome you could look at the AOI EPL-10 package from backscatter.  The ikelite with dome/extension will cost you 2465.  The EPL-10 package plus DLP-06 dome with Pany fisheye would be 2716.  Or you could add an AOI wet lens for 2427 to give you a 10-30mm equivalent or better quality with a WWL for about $2800.  The advantage of the smaller sensor comes to fore when you buy strobes.  Two INON s-2000 strobes would be $730 and are optically triggered and adequate to use with the m43sensor and fisheye or wet lens option.  Ikelite pushes towards electric sync cables and if you want TTL - ikelite strobes which start at $995 each and they are really big!  Everything - size and cost scales with sensor size.  The AOI package really is very compact and has built in manual flash trigger and vacuum system.

Yeah, the guys offer very good advice.

The Tokina might be years old, but, for APS-C it remains unbeatable and I have gone back to it after years using FF lenses on a D800. Age is nothing to do with it. It's all about does the lens do the job UNDERWATER or not. I've got a stable full of Nikkor lenses which, above ground, are superb. But in the deep, dark depths? I think not! 

The only replacement for the Tokina is the 8-15 fisheyes. For APS-C it's hard to tell the difference between the Tokina and a hugely more expensive 8-15.

As Chris says, using a fisheye is about getting really close to the subject and minimising the amount of water between subject and lens. With, for example, the Tokina, the fisheye effect is negligible unless you are shooting the horizontal on, eg, a wreck. It's rare there are straight lines underwater so the fisheye distortion isn't usually there.

Thanks a lot for all the responses! You have convinced me not to get housing for EOS R. Housing for Olympus EPL-10  is not on Ikelite website. I suppose they do not make a housing for it. 16MP on that camera is not enough for me. I like to print very large. Cozumel is no New Caledonia (Mare and Noumea are amazing places that I have been to before). I recent spent over $6K on my EOS R with 2 lenses and accessories and $3.2K on my new titanium regulator set up, plus my month long trip to Cozumel. I think I will just take my Go Pro 9 with a tray and 2 Molly 2600 lumens on this trip and call it a day. It will be financially irresponsible to invest this kind of money into underwater gear at this point. Thanks a lot for everything !

The EPL-10 is an AOI housing and the camera/standard lens is available as a package from Backscatter.   

On 6/4/2022 at 1:49 PM, Deckard said:

Thanks a lot for all the responses! You have convinced me not to get housing for EOS R. Housing for Olympus EPL-10  is not on Ikelite website. I suppose they do not make a housing for it. 16MP on that camera is not enough for me. I like to print very large. Cozumel is no New Caledonia (Mare and Noumea are amazing places that I have been to before). I recent spent over $6K on my EOS R with 2 lenses and accessories and $3.2K on my new titanium regulator set up, plus my month long trip to Cozumel. I think I will just take my Go Pro 9 with a tray and 2 Molly 2600 lumens on this trip and call it a day. It will be financially irresponsible to invest this kind of money into underwater gear at this point. Thanks a lot for everything !

As Chris said the Olympus EPL10 housing is an offering from AOI.  Also if 16MP isnt enough then you could look at the Olympus EM1 mark 3 (20MP) with the housing from AOI. The EM1-3 also offers a 50MP Hand Held High Resolution mode.

What is your definition of Very Large? I have seen many prints of 24" by 30" produced from the EPL10 with plenty of viewable details.