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Jussi holding Sony RX100 in Nauticam housing with Fix UWL lens and Twin Inon strobes and a GoPro on top!

Just as we had gotten used to seeing the “new kids on the block” in the shape of Mirrorless cameras, large sensored but compact equipment that has shaken up the underwater world, we had a new sensor size to contend with, that promised a lot but did it deliver?

Ok, a little word about sensor size for the uninitiated. Most compact cameras of the last 10yrs or so that we’ve been shooting digital have an image sensor of around the size of your little finger nail.

DSLR’s have always much larger image sensors, in some cases the size of an old frame of 35mm film or a smidgen smaller.

This has been the main reason why there was a quality difference. The much larger sensors of the interchangeable lens camera’s had a larger surface area, which made for a greater dynamic range, a better ability to cope with lower light at higher ISO’s and off chip focussing systems which made things quicker too.

A few years back though the boffins managed to reduce the size of traditional DSLR cameras by getting rid of the thing that made them physically larger. That was the mirror, hence the term Mirrorless coming into vogue.

This meant you could have a much smaller camera with all the picture qualities of a traditional DSLR.

These cameras from Olympus, Panasonic and Sony, the big two have been very late coming to the game, have made big inroads into high quality underwater imaging systems that are smaller and thus easier to travel with.

Its for these reasons that I and many others have swapped more traditional DSLR systems for Mirrorless set ups.

Nikon had dipped their toes into the water of this technology, but as of yet their products have failed to stir much underwater interest. They used a new size of sensor which was around 13mm across while being half the size of the current Mirrorless cameras it was still four times the surface area of your average compact. This format has been given the confusing name of 1inch sensor presumably it’s surface area.

Sony adopted this sensor size in a truly compact camera, last year which brings us back around to the Sony RX100.

This camera is indistinguishable in size to the higher end compacts like the Canon S100 and is actually smaller than the Canon G series model, which is all the more remarkable in that it has a sensor four times larger!

It sports the usual wide to tele zoom, and sensibly hasn’t gone for the extreme range that marks out such a lot of less seriously inclined compact cameras.

They have instead gone for quality over quantity and the camera has the useful range of 28-100mm  (35mm equivalent) with a whopping f1.8 maximum aperture at the wide end of the zoom.

I already own another Sony Mirrorless camera the Sony NEX5, and a criticism of that was it’s very exasperating menu system, the RX100 I am pleased to say is much more straightforward and intuitive, to anyone that has used a menu driven camera before.

I won’t do a full blown camera review and leave that instead to the on land testing sites like DPReview. Although I will say it has all the expected modes from full automatic to full manual and everything inbetween, and these can also be used when in the very well featured movie mode too.

I guess I also should mention the rather nice Nauticam  housing without which I wouldn’t be able to take this underwater at all!

So lets start with that Nauticam housing.Like most of their products it has a slickness of operation and well thought out design. The controls that matter like the front and rear control dials fall easily to hand, and connect reassuringly with their corresponding camera controls. They have set the bar at what we should expect from equipment we use to take pictures underwater. So much so that on the trip I also came across another manufacturers housing which was made of transparent heavy duty acrylic with large industrial knobs and buttons,and I won’t say the name but a few years ago this was all we had, this housing was positively agricultural, and suffered enormously by comparison to the Nauticam, a bit like comparing a Soviet era tractor with a Porsche!

Things really have come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years. I guess because much more of us are taking pictures underwater, and we have come to expect a certain level of quality.

The thing that makes this housing and camera combination useful, is the addition of a 67mm thread on the front of the port. This along with the fact that the lens itself doesn’t have an extreme zoom range means it’s possible to use wet lenses successfully on this housing and camera.

So pockets bulging with a couple of different suitable wide lenses and a macro lens, I entered the water for a test dive. I must also say that I was shooting with a pair of Sea and Sea YSD1 strobes, my current faves,and these were attached with a Nauticam tray and arms, and triggered by twin fibre optic cables.

I was diving at the varied and interesting dive site of Abu Galawa on our Southern Red Sea itinerary where  the wreck of a pleasure cruiser lays in shallow water, and is an uncomplaining and fairly static test subject. There is also a beautiful channel that provides plenty of soft and hard coral reefscape subject matter too.

So my first test was to see what the real difference between the angles of view of first the camera without a lens and then with the various wide angles. I have tried to frame the subject from the same position where possible, although to get the wreck in shot from my three quarters on standpoint without a lens attached meant I had to move back aways quite a bit, which shows the main advantage of using a wide angle lens, in that by reducing the water column you increase the colour and clarity of your shots.

The shot at the top of the sequence is without any lens at all and is what you would get with just camera and housing, I have done an available light test, no strobes were used.The second picture in the middle is with the Inon UWL H100 wideangle lens which gives an angle of view of around 100 degrees, framing similarly meant that I was able to get much closer with this lens, so as expected the picture has more clarity and contrast.The final shot in the sequence at the bottom is with the even wider FIX UWL28M52 domed wideangle lens.The dome allows you an even wider angle of around 130 degrees, which means you can get closer still, gaining even more clarity.

Top pic RX100 and housing only, 2nd pic Inon UWLH100, and bottom pic FIXUWL28M52 wide lens

Here is the last picture at a bigger size I have done a Lightroom edit that is bleach toned and the edges deliberately softened to make the wreck stand out more. This was with the less expensive FIX lens but I think it actually performs marginally better at the edges than the Inon however the Inon gives a more lifelike reproduction with less exaggerated perspective.

Bleach bypass effect in Adobe Lightroom, to give a slightly “other worldly” feel

Another interesting point is that this camera unlike DSLR’s or the larger Mirrorless class, will synchronise with flash right across the shutter speed range, which will then give you ultimate exposure control over both foreground and background and I have given an example sequence showing this. So the first shot at the top was with the camera settings at f9 and 1/100 sec shutter speed and using twin Sea and Sea strobes.Next pic down was the same aperture and flash output but this time the shutter speed is at 1/320 of a second darkening the background. This is about the fastest synch speed normally possible with a conventional DSLR camera. Final pic is the same aperture and flash settings but now im able because of the type of sensor this camera has to shoot at a whopping 1/1600 second shutter speed, turning the background almost completely black as if on a night dive. This gives a lot of scope for advanced exposure control, with this camera.

Top pic f9@1/100 sec, Middle pic f9@1/320 sec, and Bottom pic f9@1/1600 sec

I then had a bit of fun  trying to shoot half-halfs at the back of the boat to see if it was possible with such a small dome, it has a bit of a random factor to it, but if you shoot half a dozen or so you should get some usable results that if shot RAW you can easily balance the top and bottom half exposures using your favourite RAW processor.

Half half or split shot, with the RX100 and FIX domed wideangle lens, tricky but not impossible.

Conclusion

This is certainly a great little camera, no question. And probably ranks at the moment anyway as the premier super compact. That is as much because it is the only camera currently in this class. There really is no other camera as compact as this, with the functionality of this, and the flexibility of this. If you want the best performing small form factor camera out there, this is currently it.

It will always win against it’s closest peers because of its much larger sensor.

However nothing in life is perfect, and to make this camera sing, the best housing for it is undoubtedly the Nauticam one, I have handled the others and they don’t come close ergonomically. This means it will also be the most expensive compact set up out there, by the time you have bought all the necessary gubbins to make it work well.

ie Housing, wide angle and macro lenses, strobes and arms and trays. You may well have spent as much as it would cost almost, to go the whole hog and buy a micro four thirds or other mirrorless set up.

Something that was previously only available to compact camera users.

This came at a price though, and that was that if you were an Olympus owner like me then for this to work properly required the purchase of another kit lens, in the aforementioned Panasonic.

The lens supplied with my camera at that time was the Olympus 12-50 lens which has a couple of unique features, one of which is a very nifty built in macro function that gives it a very usable macro ratio of 1:2 or half life size.

This meant that the housing manufacturer Nauticam had had to make a special zoom gear and port for this lens, which ended up being quite expensive, and whilst it allowed you to access this macro function, the port had a larger than normal threaded front ring, which prevented any possible attachment of a wet wide angle lens. You could with an adapter attach a macro diopter to extend the range of the lens inside, but any meaningful wide angle wasn’t possible.

So that is why for anyone wanting to shoot both  wide angle and macro on the same dive the only way was to purchase the Panasonic lens as well as their existing Olympus kit lens despite the obvious doubling up of topside kit. This wasn’t the end of the world though as the combo wasn’t that much more expensive when you factored in the cost of the fancy Nauticam zoom gear you would have had to buy to use the Olympus lens.

Time changes things though and in a few short months since, there has appeared an unusual white zoom gear sourced from shop@unterwasserkamera.at in Austria which when used with the Olympus 12-50 lens allows the full use of its zoom. You can’t access its macro button but that isn’t a major problem as you will see.

There is another stroke of serendipity that makes what I am going to suggest work too.

By coincidence the macro port for the extremely highly regarded Olympus 60mm 2.8 macro lens, which is fast becoming a modern legend, also accommodates the Olympus 12-50 lens perfectly, with the end element of the zoom being as close to the port glass as its possible to be. This port is 67mm threaded so will natively accept most add on accessory lenses without step up or down rings. Now we are able to attach either the Inon wide angle or Fix UWL28M52 fisheye lens easily.

The various macro lenses from Inon and Subsee et al, will of course pop right on too.

On first inspection topside with my ex-colleague and friend Mario Vitalini from Fish in Focus, we could see that there was going to be a little vignetting particularly with the Fix lens, this wasn’t a major issue and a short zoom in got rid of our darkened corners.

Mario had shown me some very early shots in a pool of the results from the combo, and we were optimistic that out in the real world it would fare well.

My findings

I first used the Fix lens as my wide option, it’s worth noting at this point how I carry all this kit underwater, I dive with an Apeks Zuma wing which is my favourite BCD so far, but as it is a wing it lacks any sizeable pockets, so I wear a pull-on pair of Scubapro Cargo shorts over my wetsuit,these great Scubapro shorts have two decent pockets and it’s here where I place any lenses not immediately being used, I only use the one, so the other pocket is occupied with my SMB.

At first look and on my cameras LCD screen the shots looked fine, very useful angle of view, not quite fisheye but very nearly.

As is often with these tests the very first shots are of the thing closest to hand, in this case my buddy Jussi from Deepshots.

First shot with the EM5 and 12-50 @ f10 twin YSD1 and FIXUWL28M67

On closer inspection back on the laptop, at the middling aperture I had used, everything looked fine.

Unfortunately though when I checked out some later shots with this wet lens combo, that were of closer subjects with stuff going on right to the edge of the frame then the cracks began to appear. Fairly extreme chromatic aberration and zoom blurring of the edges. Fine as an effect, but not what you want most of the time.

Close Focus Wide Angle Clownfish @ f16 FIXUWL28M67 Twin S&S YSD1 strobes

1:1 Crop of furthest Clownfish, showing adequate sharpness from centrally placed subjects.

Frame edge showing extreme image blurring and separation.

This got only slightly better on stopping down to smaller apertures. The centre’s of the image remained acceptably sharp so that you could crop out the problem areas.

Cropping wouldn’t make a great deal of sense on the whole though as you may as well have not used the add on lens at all.

This problem was also with the Inon UWLH100 lens which is not so wide, but it still exhibited the corner problems.

Macro lenses worked ok though, and using the Subsee +10 I was able to get as close as would normally be required after zooming into the 50mm end of the zoom range.

At 50mm end of zoom range and with a Subsee +10 diopter attached. Shot @f16 with twin S&S YSD1 strobes as before

1:1 crop of central portion of image.

Conclusions

If you already owned the 60mm macro lens and an Olympus EM5 with the normally supplied 12-50mm kit lens, and it’s fair to say that a lot of underwater photographers might. Then the Nauticam set up with the one flat port and the German zoom gear to use for both lenses, may well seem an attractive proposition. As long as you accepted that there would be quite a quality hit for the super wide angle side of things, and so maybe only used the zoom in conjunction with a macro diopter like the Subsee, then you would have a fairly versatile system for both macro and fish portraiture covered, with the one port and the two lenses.

If though, you were a big wide angle fan then I think that the corner softness would niggle and aggravate, and you would end up buying the more specialised Panasonic 8mm Fisheye lens and Nauticam or Zen dome port ultimately.

A strobe or flashgun is considered by many to be an absolute necessity for serious underwater shooting, however I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say that, as lot’s of picture taking opportunities are well within the grasp of shooting available light only, however you will quickly find that there are many circumstances in underwater photography where you will most definitely need some extra light over and above what the sun dishes out.
This is particularly relevant if you shoot a lot in less than ideal visibility, or you dive in non tropical dive spots.

So the purpose of this post is to get you up and running with a starter set of instructions that you can utilise and build on to expand your strobe knowledge.
It should give you a little bit of understanding in simple strobe technique, and how you can use the combination of your camera and available light and also the addition of strobes to the equation.

I will use a set of real world examples, shot at the same time of day, and of the same subject so you can see how manipulating shutter speed, aperture and flash output can give you a number of different picture choices.

Flash Exposure Demo 1

Above is the shot straight from the camera, and with no settings changed than from how I had been shooting a few minutes earlier, which just shows how the light can alter dramatically as you change position.To set the scene I was having a gentle bimble on the last dive of the day, the light was getting low, and the vis wasn’t fantastic. However what I could see with my eyes differed enormously from the shot on my screen. The background was a lot lighter and bluer for a start, and the foreground was being lit, albeit dimly, by gentle late afternoon sunlight.

So how to make the scene on the screen resemble more my experience?
At this point when in the water, it’s sometimes a good idea to switch off your strobes and adjust your shutter speeds and aperture to get a decent available light shot. During the height of the day at this depth (around 10m) that may have been possible, but in the gloom of the late afternoon it becomes trickier, and your shutter speeds would be slow, your apertures wide, and your ISO’s needlessly high and grainy.

And taking all that into consideration weighing up my options, I decided to opt for a mix of daylight and strobe. I actually purpose shot this scenario just to make this demo and these circumstances proved perfect. Its not the most exciting of subject matter, but it wasn’t going anywhere so served this end well!

I am shooting with my fisheye lens so am pretty close, within arms reach of the corals. My aperture of f10 was small enough with this lens to give me reasonable depth of field ( the amount from front to back which is considered in focus) but the shutter speed, whilst adequately fast enough to freeze any ambient lit motion, was not letting enough light in to make the background light enough, it looked like a night dive.
The flash is lighting the foreground ok(ish), so I need to make the background lighter by slowing the shutter speed down thus letting more light to fall on the sensor making it brighter.

Making the background lighter by increasing or lengthening the shutter speed.

Here by lengthening the shutter speed to a 1/25th of a second I have let more light fall on the sensor, rendering the background a few shades lighter, to a deep blue colour. I have left the strobes alone for now, and kept the aperture the same so there is little change in the foreground. I am still not happy with the colour of the background and would prefer it lighter still, however I am in danger of introducing camera shake if I let the shutter speed drop further. My judgement call in this instance is to chance a slower speed, as the subject is stationary, and the image stabiliser in this camera is good so I can probably get away with more than you would think. Be careful though when doing this as if it was a moving subject like a turtle or a moray eel then you risk a double image caused by subject moving whilst the shutter is open a relatively long time, it should be good for stationary reefscapes though.

Lengthening the shutter speed to a 1/15th of a second, has made the background a nice blue.

A 1/15th of a second has been just the right shutter speed in this situation to make the background light enough. So now to set to work on adjusting the foreground exposure.

Leaving everything else as is I have now turned up the left strobe to match the rights output.

So now we have a brighter foreground by increasing the left strobes output, this has also boosted the overall foreground exposure in total, and a tiny bit too bright in my opinion now, background looks fine still though. So just minor tweaks to either the flash output or the aperture to fine tune the foreground look, and the background exposure altered with the shutter speed. So onto our final shot.

Just a minor tweak to reduce the overall flash exposure on the foreground.

Generally satisfied with the exposure, I just turned down the strobes a little as I thought I had overdone it a little with the strobes and it looked less natural. What you choose to do and how you want the end result is entirely up to you, I have tried to replicate what the actual conditions looked like, but who says that that is the “shot”.
Bear in mind that being able to control these three simple things gives you ultimate control over the end result in all sorts of conditions, so its worth learning how to do. Spend a couple of dives just practicing these simple skills, so you have it down pat for any situation that arises.

This was in a low light situation and using really low light can force you to use very long shutter speeds, which you can turn to your creative advantage. As here with these shots I have emphasised the background blur to lend a sense of speed or motion to the picture.This is called “dragging” the shutter and is a useful tool in your box of skills.

A slow shutter speed drag shot.

You can take it to extremes for dramatic effect and use it to produce twirls like this shot of my videographer friend GeGe. Some planning helps here, and we discussed the concept beforehand on the boat. So underwater there was no confusion and it only took two tries to get it right. All I did was instruct GeGe to adopt the agreed pose and then I set a slow speed of around a 1/4 of a second and when taking the shot I rotated the camera around its axis. This meant that the flash would freeze the foreground, and the long shutter speed combined with the movement “dragged” the image into a circular pattern.

A dragged shutter shot combining a circular motion and long shutter speed with a flash exposing the foreground has given this outcome.

Getting flash like this allows you to have some fun and at the same time your “getting flash” ie understanding it more.
This is only covering the exposure side of underwater photography.
I will be covering the fine art of flash positioning in a future blog post.
Don’t forget that you can also try out all these techniques when you’re  on land too.
Speak to you all soon.
Duxy

A friend of mine recently asked me about exactly how to make a finished time lapse from his GoPro shots.
GoPro’s have become very popular, and just one of their useful functions is the ability to make time lapse movies.
Most folk get a bit exasperated though as the GoPro doesn’t spit out nice tidy TL movies, and you have to do a little bit of work to achieve the finished article.
Well its very straightforward and I’ve made this little instructional video to show you the steps required.

Steps 1 and 2 I haven’t covered in the video as these are applicable to your camera and your computer, the most relevant stuff about editing the shots and then making the video within Quicktime Pro is the heart of the matter
Ideally you will need a copy of Adobe Lightroom and I am going to assume you have a basic understanding of this program.
You will definitely need a copy of Apple’s Quicktime 7 Pro for Mac or Windows this is £20 and will make time lapses a doodle as you will see. It’s also a really useful program for all sorts of video related tasks, and well worth the price.
Here is the link.
http://www.apple.com/uk/quicktime/extending/index.html
Here is the rough breakdown of tasks.

1) Shoot your time lapse shots, I usually shoot at the lowest resolution, about 5 or 7mp there is no need to use any higher resolution unless you want to do some serious cropping, in fact 2mp would be enough for HD viewing. I normaly shoot at 1 shot per second, this means that when we make the movie and it is played back at 25 frames per second then our film will be 25x faster than normal speed. This forms the basis of all time lapse calculations. i.e. if you shoot at 1 shot every 2 secs then the end result will be 50x faster than normal, or conversely if you shoot at 2 shots per second then the end result will be 12.5x normal speed. Of course you can use any rate you like, and dependent on the subject faster or slower will be more suitable.

2) Copy the pictures from the memory card into a named folder, this folder GoProJan13Card3 was already on my hard drive from a trip. In this case there is 905 pictures which based on our previous calculation will give us a 905/25 = 36 seconds long finished video.

3) We will then import these pictures into Adobe Lightroom, where we will edit the shots en masse.

4) We will then export these pictures en masse into a new folder inside the original folder called LREdited

5) We will then open Quicktime 7 and proceed to make our movie using tools within Quicktime 7

6) We will then export this movie to a compressed H264/MP4 file.