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herbko

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Posts posted by herbko

  1. Posted

    Thanks for the comments.

     

    Great stuff Hweb! Look forward to more.

    How would you compare this trip to Wakatobi?

     

    Komodo and Bali has more muck diving compared to Wakatobi. Overall, I think I had more macro photo ops and Wakatobi had more large fan and sponges and soft corals for wide angle. A couple of the sites, Crystal Rock and Cannibal Rock were amongst the best I've ever seen for the shear number of fish there. There was nothing like that at Wakatobi.

  2. Posted

    I got a Sigma 24mm macro before my Komodo trip to try my hands at CFWA shots. The lens works quite well. In my pool test, I was able to focus all the way to the surface of the 8" Aquatica dome. I did the test at Lembeh resort of all places. The people watching me go into the pool with a dome port on my housing must have thought I've OD on Nitrogen. I'm not sure the staff there has ever seen a dome port.

     

    Here are a couple CFWA shots from the trip

     

    IMG_6589.jpg

     

    IMG_7063.jpg

     

    and a couple not so CFWA

     

    IMG_7419.jpg

     

    IMG_7421.jpg

     

    The biggest barrier to getting closer is getting strobe light to the front of the big 8" dome. I'll have to find a way to get a smaller dome for the housing.

  6. Posted

    Why can't you have both?

     

    It mounts on full-frame cameras to provide a FOV greater than 180deg, and while it doesn't fill the frame entirely until ~15mm, there's always the option of cropping to reduce that wide, wide view (especially with the many megapixels of the Canon 1DsII). Not as practical, true, but ultimately still useful.

     

    You are right, but I don't think there's much point to doing that. Just use a 15mm FE and crop away until you get to a cropped sensor size image. You'll have the equivalent of about a 10-15 on a cropped sensor, and you can have verticals without rotating the camera.

  7. Posted

    A quick update on what's happened. I'm writing from the Murex Lembeh Resort.

     

    My 2 bags totaled 40.8 kg. The lady checking me in told me there's a 30kg limit and then squinted at a chart by her keyboard and gave me a overweight charge. I think it was around 28000/kg, which is around $3/kg. Then she asked the purpose of my trip. I told her scuba, and she said there's another 10kg allowance and let it go.

     

    I let you know if it works on the way back. I'll have to make sure all my stuff is really dry.

  12. Posted

    A tv station thats online...

     

    Take a look at:

     

    www.theunderwaterchannel.tv

     

    I finally had time to look. Interesting. It seems to be a sequence of streaming videos. I poked around a little. The "schedule" on the side lets the viewer go back to a previous clip, but does not allow skipping forward to clips scheduled "later". It's possible to skip forward to the end of the current clip, but that loops you back to same clip instead of the next one.

     

    Is the above the basic behavior that distinguishes an online tv station from a website with streaming clips?

  15. Posted

    I sometimes use the scheme developed by Craig Jones: magenta filter on the lens and the complement green filter on the strobes. This has the net effect of subtracting green ambient light while leaving the color of the strobe light unchanged. This is especially useful when the water conditions are less than the ideal tropical blue, and I think it also helps a little with sunball rendering.

  17. Posted

    I use a Seagate 400GB USB/Firewire on a Dell 9100 laptop and tried both the USB and Firewire connections and not really noticed much difference. I'm not doing video, so perhaps I haven't stressed the cpu.

     

    One thing I find annoying about this external drive, and maybe it's only this one, is that it spins down after a short period of inactivity and take a few seconds to restart.

     

    Is there a way to modify the drives sleep settings in Windows or is it drive dependent?

  18. Posted

    Mark, thanks for posting those photos, very interesting. My gut was telling me that given the right circumstances the 85 prime lens would work underwater. Were you using that with a 5D or another camera? Underwater photography is such a long learning curve and the 100mm macro was one of the worst for me to learn just to use adequately underwater. At least I know I could try the prime 85L in different situations and just see what comes up. I sincerely appreciate everyone's input. the 5D should arrive before noon and I can't wait to start practicing.

     

    The 100mm macro will be very different on the 5D vs the 300D. The FF sensor will give a 1.6x greater field of view and it'll be like using a 60mm on the 300D.

  19. Posted

    I have the Sigma 50mm. The lens extends quite a bit when focused to 1:1. Also, the front element is recessed ~1/2 inch from the front of the lens, a built in hood. The net result is that on my Aquatica setup, I have to add the same extension I use for the Canon 100mm to make it fit. That plus the large diameter of the Aquatica macro port makes it not practical to shoot at 1:1. I can never light a subject properly when focused that close with that lens.

     

    I find that I seldom use that lens with the 5D. The very few times I have, I've set the focus limit switch to 2:1 which allows a shorter port extension and increases autofocus speed.

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