luminary

Got underwater with my 85mm today. I really enjoy shooting with this lens, both topside and underwater. I was very happy with my results, considering it was only my second dive ever with a DSLR and the first time shooting macro. I don't have any experience with any other macro lens to compare to, but I was happy with this one. Got a thread in the gallery with a few images. http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=42578

Did some local dives here in Clearwater Florida today. Only the second time ever diving with a DSLR rig and first time shooting macro. Nothing great from a composition perspective, but my bar was pretty low - basically I was shooting for in focus, properly exposed results. Gotta learn the gear and get used to diving with it! All were shot at ISO 200, 1/100 second and f/22. Inon strobes were on sTTL. Little bit of touchup (exposure) in Lightroom. All uncropped except for one. Any comments or suggestions are certainly welcome! Full Gallery Some of the ones I like best:

Great pics Edward, thanks for the feedback. I did end up getting the 85 and have my first dive with it tomorrow. Spent a couple hours in the pool last night getting familiar with it so hopefully can get some OK shots tomorrow.

I spent some time last night and tonight doing some adjustments on my AD7000 and got the AF lever working better. Thought I'd share. This pictures shows the two places where I made adjustments on the AF lever: The one on the right (inside the housing) tightens the "fork" against a flat surface on the inside rod so it can't change much there. But if you losen the outside one, you can turn the inside piece a little bit. The problem is that when you move from manual to auto, the camera switch doesn't move enough. By adjusting the lever, you can change the position of where it makes contact with the camera switch. This made things much better for me, but not perfect. The other thing I did was I had to replace the shooting mode gear because the release mode (ie, single shot, continuous shot) dial wasn't working. The replacement gear was slightly shorter and from what Jean explain caused extra pressure on the dial. When I replace that, it fixed my release mode selector, but it also corrected the AF lever. I can now switch to auto focus without having to pull it out to get over the handle. Thought this might help anyone else who had a similar issue.

OK, so not horrendous by what a lot of people on here deal with, but pretty miserable for what I'm used to. Was probably about 10' with a lot of large particulate in the water. I did consider the Tokina as well, but was concerned about the extension length on it. I decided to give the 85 a try, ordered everything late last night. Will definitely give some feedback here once I get some time with it.

That's often true topside too but the concern with f2.8 vs. f3.5 would be the available light while focusing. If I were going to just be using it above water, that difference wouldn't matter to me, but was curious about the impact underwater and if people care about the 2/3 stop difference.

After the horrendous vis here in Tampa lately, I've pretty much decided I'm not going to be able to get by just with WA shooting for now. So I'm looking at macro choices for my D7000 / Aquatica rig. I'm really intersted in the Nikkor 85mm as it fits more what I would use it for topside and seems like it's a good trade off instead of buying both the 60 and 105 for underwater use. A lot of the review sites don't seem that thrilled with it, but the few topside shooters I've found are mostly happy with it. The biggest comment I've seen about it is preferring to go with an f2.8 lens instead of the f3.5 that this is. I could only find one or two threads here with people using it. Anyone have any feedback, hopefully with some sample shots? Thanks!

Mine does the exact same thing. Same symptoms too - it worked when I first got the housing and now it seems to stick a bit on the handle. Maybe it was just tight enough brand new but as things loosen up slightly the tolerance adjusted. I got pretty consistent at pulling it out just a tad to get AF to engage but if it starts to bother me I'll probably just do as you mentioned dremil out a bit, will only need at most a millimeter shaved off the corner.

Congrats on the new housing. I just put mine together for the first time today and struggled with the microphone door too. Pretty much just came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to plug in the hyrdophone. It was continuously getting in the way while trying to seal the housing up.

I'm sure they'll be great! I even had a few 20x30 prints done by Elco-color (their $10 internet special) and they turned out awesome. You can see a little bit of pixelation if you look close, but from more than a foot or so away you can't see any flaw. And they were photos taken with a cheap 70-300 lens!

great shots! I did the exact same thing only it was half the pictures on my honeymoon! I was quite upset when I found out about it, but 400 prints later, I'm over it because you just can't tell. And some of them have been printed at 12x18. I really wish it was displayed on either the LCD on top, or in the viewfinder.

So why not use one of them? I use CVS (http://www.cvshome.org) to manage all of my software development, as well as word documents, spreadsheets, pdfs. It works perfectly fine for images that are a part of my development projects and should work equally as fine for photographers. Of course, in typical open source fashion, it's cludgy for non techies to learn, but for your use it should be straightforward. I am in the process of designing an image storage server (in my copious amounts of free time :roll: ) and it will most likely utilize CVS for versioning.

Not sure about an answer to your question, but I've usually had pretty good luck with contacting them when I needed to. Have you tried calling them? I'll PM you a direct email to the Service Manager that I've dealt with. He's always responded quickly to me.

I think this is a particularly apt quote, especially to myself as it pertains to me exactly. I am not a professional photographer and never want/will be. However, I have had several random contacts from people to use my images in a few different online ways. Mostly topside photos, but a few underwater ones as well. In some cases I've given them permission, and in others not. As my skills have improved, I've really begin considering selling a few of them (or trying to at least). However, I've no idea what to expect/ask in terms of pay. At this point, if an organization approaches me that I am willing to support, I generally just give it to them rather than worry about the whole cost issue.

I have been struggling with the best way to store my complete image library. Now I'm not talking about portable storage or on the go...but once you get home and permanently store all of your images, how do you do it? Right now, I've got all of my images burned to CDs or DVDs (with redundant copies in most cases). However, while this may be fine for storage, it doesn't really let me "use" my library. Let's face it, we take pictures to look at them, not to put them on a CD to collect dust. So how do you manage your library? Index prints for each CD? A software system that catalogues your disks? I've been dancing with the idea of building a try storage server with a database that stores all of my images on a high capacity hard drive and that is regularly backed up to DVD. But that's a lot of effort to end up with something that might be cludgy to use. Very interested in hearing what others do.