bvanant

I use one of the razor blade cutters nice clean cuts

The pro 1.4 works with the Tokina on a 7D. Bill

I don't know if Nauticam ever sold them but the part in the photo is clearly the XIT version, note the pins that stop rotation, I use mine with ULCS ball arms.

Not Nauticam but XIT 404. I have several of them. Bill

One trick is to make a custom white balance card that has a bunch of red sharpie stripes on it. Works well at least for macro type things. Bill

Think of the fuel surcharge for that trip. Bill

The amount of light cut out by a filter is independent of the source light over the wavelength of the filters of course). Most folks are using the same COB leds with the same color spectrum so unless you went to great lengths to engineer a specific spectrum the transmission should be fixed. Bill

South Komodo on a nice liveaboard. Bill

I don't know about the IQ of the Nikon 60 vs the 105, but both are 1:1 lenses. The DXo boys think the 105 is slightly better in terms of accutance than the 60 but they are very comparable. All that being said, I think the OP was interested in magnification. Bill

There are strap wrenches made for 1/4 inch (6 mm) diameter bits, but I would use a slack jaw pliers with a rubber insert (often called a plug pliers). Or simply wrap the valve with some old wetsuit piece and then use a regular pliers carefully. Bill

In general yes, for the same diopter you can more magnification with a longer lens than a shorter one. Bill

A lot depends on the material and the stuff you put on it. During manufacturing of some implantable medical gizmos we would routinely swell a silicone o-ring to get it large enough to slide over an actuator. We should use something volatile so that when it evaporated the o-ring was back to normal size. The math of the swelling is complex i.e., does the hole in the center get bigger or does the wall thickness get larger. In any case swelling with silicone oil should be pretty irreversible, mostly that stuff stays on a surface forever. Bill

Do you like the P800? I have been looking for a replacement for my Canon printer. Bill

No regret, especially traveling (what is that?). It is very interesting to see what often happens on a typical liveaboard. The guy with the biggest/fanciest camera system is given lots of love, sometimes even better guides. In some cases this is justified but in many cases when the first few days photos get shared people's preconceptions change. So yes I have no regrets, I am very happy with the OM-D EM-1 MII and would not be tempted to move back to either FF or APS-C. The system is far better than I am. Bill

I moved from the 7D in a Nauticam housing to an Olympus OMD-EM1 Mark II also in Nauticam. I took both on an Indonesia Liveaboard trip and during photo sessions asked other divers to compare shots blind. There was no difference mostly but a bit of a preference for the Olympus photos. Every year LAUPS (well not this year) has a booth at the Long Beach Scuba show. We combined with Orange County UPS have a booth where there are at least 80 photos from cameras ranging from P&S to D850, and everything in between, but predominantly Canon 5DIV, Nikon D850, D500, and Olympus micro 4/3. I do all the printing for both groups and print at 16x20 inches (406 x 508 mm for those of you not familiar with US Customary Units) and all formats print beautifully. The biggest differences between the photos is the skill of the photographer rather than the format. I have not tried to print much larger (a larger printer for my house would come with a divorce attorney I suspect) but at that size the Olympus EM1 Mark II is perfectly fine. Cheers Bill

Where are you located? A loaner might be possible. Bill

The o-rings on most strobe arms are size 2-209. You might be able to get some metric ones that are a bit larger or smaller but I am too lazy to figure that out. What is more useful I suspect is to change the material of the o-rings. Durometer and chemistry will make a big difference in terms of being able to tighten appropriately. Bill

I am pretty sure that the current Parker silicone grease (sorry a high viscosity silicone oil; I suspect that Parker calls an oil with filler a grease) will swell silicone o-rings. I wouldn't put barium grease near my housing. For universal o-ring lubes I think any of the Christolube/Tribolube/Krytox greases will work. Bill

To Tom's point, Parker makes some nice lubes , but they are not universal lubes, just silicone oil which can seriously swell silicone o-rings (they are good for nitrile). Tribolube, Christolube, and any of the other per-fluoro ether materials are good for any kind of o-ring. Bill

We use the MAHA 4-battery chargers (now more than 6 years old). I worry a lot about having redundant charging capability; we had a guy set his wet housing on top of one of our chargers and it failed the blue smoke test. So we take 4 x 4 battery chargers for two strobes and a set of 4AA for a video monitor back. At home I use the Nitecore 8x charger for all types of batteries but it is a bit large for travel. Bill

The downside to versatility is performance (or there is no free breakfast). Bill

According to Eska (who make 1.5 mm fiber optic fiber) the minimum bend radius for a 0.5 DB loss (about 60% if I remember how to convert dB to percent) is 40 mm so quite big. For the 1 mm fiber it is 25 mm. So not so small. Bill

"I have tried to contact two i-fiber cable suppliers, no luck, they are not interested in selling short lengths of cable." Elias: That is strange since I have given the website directly to you and on this thread. i-fiberoptics sells almost all of the Asahi multi-core materials by the meter and you can easily order on the website. https://i-fiberoptics.com/asahi-multi-core-cable-detail.php?id=3360&sum=166 is the page and at the bottom it is $7.50 per meter. You can buy 1 meter is you want. Fiberfin sells some Asahi materials but not the 613 core stuff. Other than them I don't know of any suppliers of the Asahi materials in the US (we use the Asahi fiber in some medical applications). Bill

"Just thought I would chime in on I-fiberoptics. I purchased 7m and was quoted $12 for shipping on the website. After the fact, they emailed and had me pay another $36 for shipping. It came in a padded envelope, and there was absolutely ZERO chance it cost $48 to ship it. The original $12 was very likely correct." It might be because you are in Hawaii but that hasn't been my experience. I have bought from them a lot and never had anything like that happen. My last 8 meter batch cost $11 or so here to California. Bill

Partly it is the lens choice. Supermacro is tricky and adding a wet diopter makes it more tricky. Depth of field is shallow at f6.3 and larger apertures; nothing you can do about that (it is physics). Try this on land with the housing setup. Get a nice small flower with good colors and shapes. Set u your system on a tripod and shoot with the lens alone. The kit lens has a native magnification of only 0.21 meaning that on your 6300, a critter about 100 mm will fill the frame. If you add the AOI you will get more magnification but much shallower DOF. So take some shots of your flower at various settings, with and without the add on lens. Try shooting at apertures higher than 8 (like f/16). If you want the whole nubibranch sharp then shoot from a bit further away and crop a bit, Cheers Bill