BHC

Really nice. I especially like the wide angle with the ghost pipefish.

I don't quite follow what you're trying to do, but I can share my experiences. When I dive locally, I sometimes carry a small GPS receiver (Qstarz BT-Q1000XT) in a small plastic case (Pelican 1010) connected to a line, which I hold or attach to myself. The case is waterproof and bobs on the surface above me while I swim along the bottom. When the dive is over, the GPS track can be merged with the photos to yield GPS-tagged underwater photos. Presumably one can replace the altitude information in the GPS track with depth data from a dive computer, but I haven't tried. This arrangement has some practical problems/irritations. The GPS track is intermittent, although if I find something interesting underwater, I'll hang around long enough that it will record some points. Having to manage a line to the surface while handling an SLR with strobes can be a bother. An alternative would be to carry the GPS and case in a BCD pocket and only deploy them to the surface if something interesting turns up, but I don't trust the Pelican case at depth.

Impressive! Where was the first section section (canyons/walls) filmed? I don't remember seeing topography like that in Lembeh.

Your guess is correct, swimming with humpbacks is illegal in Hawaii. A much more enjoyable way of getting to Captain Cook is to rent a kayak and paddle across Kealakekua Bay. Place of Refuge (aka Two Step) is a great spot for shore diving or snorkeling. You and/or the tour operator could be fined; at a minimum, expect to be yelled at. Save the humpbacks for your Tonga trip!

Nikonrumors now has a link to a page with some full-res samples at high ISO (800-25400). Based on these limited data, I would say that the performance in DX crop mode will not be competitive with the D7000. I wonder about the utility of FX for underwater shooting. For macro, I use the Tamron 90 or Nikon 105 on a DX body. So to get the same composition in FX, one would need to either use a 150 mm or longer lens, or get 33% closer to the fish. Either way, the whole business becomes more challenging.

Indonesia. First day of a three week trip. The boat guy hands down my camera. I take it and start to deflate my BC. Then I see the flashing red light on top of the housing. I jump back on the boat, crack open the housing, and find about 1/2 cup of sea water inside. The camera is wet but seems to work. I dry it off with my shirt and reattach the hotshoe connector, but the strobes don't fire. That night I carefully clean off the hotshoe, hotshoe connector, and the inside of the housing with fresh water. The strobes start firing again, good as new. Turns out that the o-ring pinched or came unseated when I bayonetted the port onto the housing. In the end, the only thing that didn't survive was the leak detector itself, since it consisted of an unprotected circuit board that was fried by the salt water. It saved my trip though.

Wow, I love the angler.

Just to echo the comments above, the Nikon 20mm isn't really a great lens. I find it to be about the same sharpness as the Nikon 18-200 with equivalent chromatic aberration.

Great shots! The harlequin does look good against that background. I really like the tomato cod too. Thanks for sharing.

I give Divervision a thumbs up. I bought an Inon Z-240 from them a while ago. After about 3 months it quit working, so I sent it back for warrantee service. They fixed it up and sent it back, and I haven't had a problem since.

Wow, those are some nice shots! Glad you were able to recover them. Thanks for sharing.

That's fantastic! Thanks for sharing.

The quoted statement is unjustifiably broad. At each point in the image, diffraction and defocus both contribute to the blur. Without knowing how much the subject deviates from the plane of focus, you can't really say at what point diffraction will begin to dominate.

Often, one component of my enjoyment of a picture is an appreciation of how hard it must have been for the photographer to make it. And it's much harder to take the trouble to get your dome 3 inches from the subject in a ripping current with strobes properly articulated and balanced with ambient light than it is to just get a quick snap as you drift by, to be followed up by a crop/clone/fill-light session in Photoshop. (Of course, at full magnification you can't fake it, but at web resolution you often can.) I see a parallel here with the once-active debate about splicing out wrong notes in music performances. There's nothing wrong with it artistically, but knowing that it's happening makes it a bit less easy to marvel at the performer's raw technique.

I believe the Ikelite convertor only works with Ikelite strobes. For my Subal-housed D200 with Inon strobes, I use the Sea & Sea TTL convertor III. It works well. The Heinrichs TTL circuit also works, although having a bare circuit board stuck to the inside of the housing with bubble gum isn't confidence-inspiring, and you can't switch from TTL to manual with the housing closed.