128 replies to this topic

[Rai]

In this post I put my first impressions about this lens:

http://wetpixel.com/...m...st&p=106703


In this spanish forum there are two post with a very little selection done with the photos full size:

http://forobuceo.com...pic.php?t=24394

http://forobuceo.com...pic.php?t=24409

But I'll add some explanations here.

This is one on-land shot of the Coal dock in the Tarragona harbor, just at the other side of the entrance do the dive site.



Just looking to the other side I've made a check test with the camera mounted on the hosuing. This image is shifted in brightness and contrast to reveal better the vignetting of the dome shade on land:



As I wrote in the other post, there were some alignment problems mainly dued to the adaptation for the 400D of my Ikelite housing for the 350d.

Luckily, UW vignetting is lower and only you can see on the lower corners (specially on the right one due to the camera adapatation). One alignmet is corrected if some vignetting still persists, a file can just solve it .

The conditions were not ideal as you can see in this photos. In the first one you can see (or not ) the line that guide us to the wreck:







But at very shallow depths, with available ligth, water can look very different if you just look upwards:



Due to the low viz conditions and the special quality of that lens I only used 10 mm focal (180º) in my photos, but I made one shot to test that everything was also fine with the port at the other side of the focal scale (17 mm):




This is a very promising ISO 800 test shot about how to improve posibilities in murky conditions with available light:



I don't know to post the other thumnails after this post or open a new one. Suggestions ?

Rai

Edited by Rai, 01 November 2006 - 10:29 AM.

[mattdiver]

Nice images, Rai. This lens looks very promising for underwater use...

[MikeVeitch]

good tests...

have you thought about removing the shade to avoid the vignetting?

[Alex_Tattersall]

Thanks for that Rai,

Where did you buy it ? How much ?

[Rai]

This is the continuation of this post:

http://wetpixel.com/...showtopic=15933


As a qualty measurement test I've said that no blurring or blooming were found. Obviously, this is an extreme zoom lens with a port which doesn't have to be the best one and some detail and sharpness will be lost in the corners. To show that I've chosen a propr photo but one that also shows the worst purple fringing I found in all the photos. In most of the photos you want see that (only in extreme contrat lines). I'd say that CA level is a little bigger than the one you can get on land.

The first photo is of the lower right corner with simple RAW processing.



The second one includes some ACR CA correction. It's only a quick adjustemt and didn't fix all the CA, but I suppose that this could be done better (or with other software).



This is the original photo:




And now to finish this test, just a collection of shots of the wreck:














These ones and a few more photos can be seen here:

http://forobuceo.com...pic.php?t=24409

Hope you like it and find it useful

Rai

Edited by Rai, 02 November 2006 - 02:08 AM.

[Alex_Mustard]

Very useful indeed. Thanks Rai for taking the time to post these.

Alex

[Rai]

Thank you for your opinions.

have you thought about removing the shade to avoid the vignetting?

Well, the shade it's a bit loose so this may affect, but the first thing I've to do is get a proper camera center to see which is the real vignetting problem. Then I think that A file woul be just enough.


If anyone is interested, bought the lens at divervision, but I think that now there are a lot more places you can find this lens.

Rai

[Rai]

This last weekend was a very busy one, but I found some time to take a look at my housing and my mods to get a proper camera alignment.

I realise that I had some bad references for proper shade alignment , and saw that the assymetric shape of the shade had it's influence in asymetric vigneting.

After correcting all the alignments, including a measurement check of the lens center alignment trough the port hole, I could see that no vignetting was visible trough viewfinder. Altough it still appears in the photos (viewfinder doesn't cover 100%). It was very small and probably it will disappear completely UW but I couldn't check it (and don't know exactly when I'll have the chance to do it).

Rai

[TomStack]

Rai,

Thank you very much for your efforts and photos.

We're going to order a Tokina as soon as one is available for our Canon 20D's!

Best,

Tom & Therisa Stack (off to DEMA shortly)

http://www.tomstackphoto.com

[Divervision]

Rai,

Thank you very much for your efforts and photos.

We're going to order a Tokina as soon as one is available for our Canon 20D's!

Best,

Tom & Therisa Stack (off to DEMA shortly)

http://www.tomstackphoto.com

Hi Tom,

Sorry to jump on this thread if that is not Wetpixel etiquette but I wanted to tell you that the same lens can be used with your Canon 20D. It has become our most popular lens.

Best wishes
Sam
DiverVision

[TomStack]

Hi Sam,

Do you have on available here in U.S.? If so please email me!

Thanks,

Tom

Hi Tom,

Sorry to jump on this thread if that is not Wetpixel etiquette but I wanted to tell you that the same lens can be used with your Canon 20D. It has become our most popular lens.

Best wishes
Sam
DiverVision

[GLOC]

Has anyone tried this lens on the front of an S2?

[pakman]

Rai,

Nice... didn't see this thread til today.

Slight thread hijack... Mind if I ask you how you modified your Ikelite 350D housing to fit the 400D? I've got friend who would love to do the same as he's jealous that I can use my 400D in my Sea & Sea housing with very little modification.

Edited by pakman, 10 December 2006 - 08:26 AM.

[Rai]

Rai,

Nice... didn't see this thread til today.

Slight thread hijack... Mind if I ask you how you modified your Ikelite 350D housing to fit the 400D? I've got friend who would love to do the same as he's jealous that I can use my 400D in my Sea & Sea housing with very little modification.

I thought you've seen this. Otherwhise I'd sent you a pm about the mods (I recall that you were interested in this).

Well, the modifications were slight at first (just to make this test) but a llitle more than in the S&S case. But finally this weekend I ended with some stronger mods to allow me to acces ALL buttons . But the weather and sea conditions didn't allow me to test it underwater yet .

All my mods are extremely rough and requires some adjusting afterwork to make it function properly. I don't have the proper measuring and machining tools to do it in a pro looking way and I used very odd materials. But the important fact is that they work pretty well, at least for me.

I'll post some photos and futher explanations soon.

Of course, I'm just talking about what I've done. I don't recommend to do this because it's easy to damage your equipment and I'm pretty sure it will void your warranty. Remember that if you decide to do this kind of mods to a housing, you always do it at your own risk.

Besides, I found one thing that might be significative when useing a 400D with the 350D Ikelite housing. In this test I used strobes in manual mode due to the wiring setup I used (the the e-ttL converter was not powered) and everything worked well.
But when I tried the 400D with only the DS-125 and the proper sync cord that was no longer true. As soon as i press slightly the shutter button in order to get focus, the flash becomes to fire serveral times without control and usually without doing the shot. The few times you get the shot, it was very easy that the shot was dark. If you get manual it work till you do the first shot, the the control gets blocked and doesn't respond. It becomes completely unusable.

I'm aware that my sync cord is actually broken internally and doesn't work right 100% but I tried with the 350D and converter behaviour certainly wasn't the same in both cameras. So, I'm almost sure that the Ikelite e-TTL converter of the 350D housing it's not full compatible with the 400D, but I can't assure it due to the cord or maybe I've got an early version of the controller (I've got the one of the earlier versions of this housing). Maybe someone could test it at home and clear my doubts. In the meantime I'll use my old dual sync cord setup (I've no problem with that).

Rai

[pakman]

Rai,

Gracias for taking the time out to reply. Actually the information is for a friend who has a 350D and the Ikelite 350D housing. He was hoping that a 400D would fit the Ikelite 350D housing with "little" modifications. Not sure how if he's up for making major mods.

That's interesting that the DS-125/ Ikelite housing TTL isn't syncing with the 400D. I've been lucky that the 400D appears to be working properly with the Sea & Sea TTL converter and my Inon Z-240's.

Well if you ever get around to taking photos of the housing modifications, I'm sure my friend would appreciate seeing what has to be done.

edit: I forgot to mention, I will be meeting up with my friend at the end of the month for a dive trip so we could do a quick test of my 400D connected to the Ikelite TTL circuit and his DS-125's.

Edited by pakman, 11 December 2006 - 09:55 AM.

[Rai]

Well in fact tey are not major mods, but in my case involved some drilling and threading in the converter case just to put new aligment posts. Not really harmful if well done but I'm pretty sure that it voids the warranty. The old alignments posts can be kept in order to revert the conversion.

My system to acces all buttons was not as clever, smart and harmless as yours (I've just seen it just a few minutes ago), but my transfer pad it's not very dificult to make and some drill/threading in the back might be susbstitued by glue, but I prefer to be able to unscrew the whole transfer pad, leaving just two tiny holes.

And I'm pretty sure that some wall anchors might be used with the ikelite too, so you're probably the best man to give advice to your friend in how to do so.

If you can make that test with your friends housing I'll really appreciate it.

Rai

[timrock]

Hi Folks,

Thanks for the report Rai. I was very curious about this lens.

Tom, just wondering why you would want this lens over the Canon 10-22? It can't accept polarizing filter for land use and it covers lens focal range. What are tthe pluses aside from a $100 in price?

Best,

Tim of the Deep

[Rocha]

Tim: in short, angle of coverage. This is a fish eye lens, not a rectilinear wide angle. This is the first and only fisheye available for Canon cropped sensor cameras. Nikon has the 10.5.

Luiz

[timrock]

Hi Luiz,

Thanks for that. I find the 10-22 on my 20D at 10 pretty close to my old 10.5 with a bit less distortion. Will be interesting to get the 10-17 on my 20D and see the actual difference and if its as wonderful as I remember the Nikon 10.5 being. I have certainly been waiting for too long for Canon to come up with a 10 or so Fisheye. I have been using the full 8mm and cropping.

Glad someone (Tokina) stepped up to the plate! If you look at past threads, I was even looking into using the adapter to try to mount a 10.5 on my Canon!

I used a D200 with a 10.5 and the new AquaView VF on an Aqautica housing last week in Grand Cayman as a test for a week and that combination certainly has me thinking of jumping back to Nikon. This new Aquatica VF with the 10.5 is brighter than the old RS with the 13mm and the focusing with a 105 is really easy to see. Very tempting.

Best,

Timbo

[Rai]

Hi luiz

A friend of mine did some testing with the Tokina on a Nikon machine and compared its angle of view with the 10.5. The results show no significative difference and I believe that the slight difference is dued to the different lengths of the lenses.

In this thread of a spanish forum, he put some very good examples of the Tokina 10-17 and almost at the end of the post you can find some shots of a comparation of angles of view of the 10.5 and the tokina (at 10 and 17):

http://forobuceo.com...pic.php?t=24958

Maybe the angle of view in a Canon it's slightly smaller than in a Nikon body due to the different crop factor (1.6 vs 1.5) but I don't know and, sincerely, I don't care. I just love that lens, even for surface use. I post some surface shots in the same forum for showing the posibilities on land for a friend concerned about surface use:

http://forobuceo.com...pic.php?t=25072

Most of the shots are at 10mm and some are shot with the clear intention to avoid showing the heavy fisheye barrel distortion (succesfuly enough I hope) but others are taken without any any concern for this kind of distortion for more impacting images. I've to say that I really enjoyed making photos with that lens.

Rai