bvanant

For night and black water dives, the 30 is indeed my go to lens, the 60 is too hard in those conditions. Bill

We have an RX100-V. Nice for wide angle stuff and fish portraits, really not nice in any way for macro things but maybe your idea of macro and ours is different. Check out www.blueviews.net for some macro video, not shot with the RX Bill

I shoot all of these on a regular basis (except the Hopkins which is quite rare in PV where we are diving. I use both the 30 and 60 but my preference is for the 60. It is sharper than the 30 and as Chris says getting them full frame with the 30 is quite tough. The other advantage of the 60 is that if you use an external diopter you get more magnification. BVA

broken tubes are quite ubiquitous with these guys. If there is a repair guy near you a new tube will be $100 or so installed. As for new strobes, I would go the Inon route, they seem to be far more reliable. Bill

There was a case for other S&S strobes where the firmware needed to be updated to solve this particular problem. If you are going to test AA batteries, I think a load tester is more useful than a simple volt meter since the discharge curve is quite flat, but for sure it will let you know if the batteries are dead. Bill

I tried S&S once and they didn't have a part number for them. You might call Pacific Housing repair, I suspect he has dozens of them. BVA

I am not sure that the Tak Lung that Jack is selling will fit the holes on the S&S strobes, the Tak Lung version is for putting on trays. Bill

Something is definitely wrong here. As you know, if the camera is in fill mode that is TTL. That should work with the strobes in TTL (it does on my version). If the camera flash is in manual then the strobe needs to be in one lighting bolt mode. As far as I understand (probably not very far) the B Mode on the strobe allows it to look at the pre-flashes from the EM-1 (I think there are 3) for use in TTL type situations. That is why the 2 lightning bolts work. On my camera and strobes, running the camera flash on manual and the strobes on 1 lightning bolt always works. Don't understand why it doesn't Bill

This should not be hard Camera should be set on manual strobe and say 1/16 power. Strobe should be set on the one lighting bolt setting (not the two lightning bolts, that is for pre-flash). If that is not working, check your strobe cables. Bill

Don't worry. Pretty soon Terry will figure out that they aren't really Hypselodoris anymore and we will all have to learn another name. Many of the SoCal nudis that we all knew now have new names. Bill

dang it your making me jealous again. Bill

Yes, and yes. Lighting is very well suited to practice, particularly macro lighting. What I tell all of the beginner photographers is to put your camera in the housing with the arms and strobes on and mount the whole thing on a tripod. Go to your garden, florist etc. and get a nice flower. Put it in a holder and set up your camera in front of it. Take lots of photos at various strobe positions (use your cell phone to take pics of the setup as you change it). Don't worry too much about hurting your strobes if you are only taking a few shots, just take them 30 seconds apart. This will get you familiar with the lighting but also the controls of your housing. Cheers bill

A couple of points. PCR tests are in fact nuclei acid amplification tests. They are not antibody tests. Antibody tests will tell you if you have been infected in the past, PCR tests will tell you if you have COVID RNA floating around in your blood. I THINK what Troporobo meant was that in fact some people who have been vaccinated can still get COVID (the vaccines are between 75 and 95% effective). Remember that the endpoints of the vaccine trials was not lack of COVID in the blood but rather it was symptomatic illness. No one knows for sure but it is certainly possible that a significant number of people in the vaccine trials (and now in the real world) might still get infected and as such still be able to infect others but they won't get sick enough to go to the hospital. It is still early days in terms of what we know about the vaccine and the new mutations so I think it is still prudent to be very cautious Bill

Well we didn't do it that way. I handed up my camera and BC while standing on the lowest rung of the ladder. Then I took the damn thing off while standing in the water. It was only 11C (52F) so it wasn't as bad as say Alaska, but no more dives that day. Bill

In a recent JAMA study, it shows that for most of the current mutations, something like 60% of transmission is from asymptomatic patients, roughly half of that from people before they show symptoms and the other half from patients that never show symptoms. One big issue though is that there is no good test for live virus i.e. viral load. The typical PCR tests only look for RNA and that may or may not due to live virus. I will supposedly get my second shot in a week or so (Moderna) here in Los Angeles, but my wife is likely at least two months away. Certainly I would like to travel but getting a severe COVID infection in the wilds of Indonesia (think Triton Bay) seems like a bad idea. Bill