Zen dome macro shots

After reading a post on wetpixel by Stephen Frink (see the post here) on using a small dome with macro lenses, I thought I'd give the Zen dome a try.

I used with a Nikon 60mm f2.8, on a very dark and gloomy day. For reference purposes, the water temp was 4 degrees, and I lost all sensation in my hands for most of the dive (despite dry gloves!) The port gives really nice results-sharp and it corrects the parallax that you get with conventional flat ports. I will definitely try it some more

Amazing footage of feeding sailfish

Sailfish - House of Sailing Daggers from Blue Sphere Media on Vimeo.

Wintery walk in the Lake District

Caron and I loaded up the dogs and went off for a walk around the Walna Scar Road, Coniston. It was a fantastic snowy cleat day, with awesome views back towards home and the coast. The dogs had a great time playing in the snow!

Fergus Kennedy's Red Sea video

A great piece of video, made all the more remarkable by the fact that some of it was shot using a Canon 5D MkII digital SLR. Apart from showing the skill of the film maker, it also shows how far along these cameras have come in terms of video output.

I wish Nikon would get their offerings sorted out to compete!

Under the Red Sea from Fergus Kennedy on Vimeo.

Nauticam UK site is up

Alex Tattersall's Underwater Visions site is now up here This brings Nauticam housings officially to the UK. They are certainly the most talked about new housings for a long time, and seem to offer a plethora of features. I like the idea of being able to use existing ports on them, a solid locking port system, and the idea that misaligned controls will "mesh" themselves. Neat engineering!

More Smugmug greatness

I mentioned in a post earlier that I had been playing and trying to get my head around integrate all the social media that I seem to be involved with. I have twitter, facebook, blogger and my web site, and to update all of them separately could take hours!

Smugmug, where my site (adamhanlon.com)is hosted have just launched a tool known as smart galleries. By adding keywords to images, it gathers these together in a gallery for you-as virtual images. They also have a "show off" facility that allows you to generate slideshows like the one below automatically!



I've used twitterfeed to gather the feed from this blog, and hopefully to publish it to twitter and facebook.

Zen 100mm dome comparison

I'm using it for close focus wide angle (CFWA) and wide angle macro (WAM) to get round the problems of trying to light things that are very close to the dome port. I'm shooting DX with my D2Xs in a subal Housing and have been using a Tokina 10-17 for some time. I've set the dome up with a 30mm extender, which seems OK, but this may well need additional adjustment.

My first impression of the dome was quite how small it is! When compared with an 8" dome it seems really tiny! It also seems very well made and finished.

In use, for CFWA, with a Kenko 1.4x converter, you can really feel the magnification working! You can get the front of the dome so close to the subject that you really can feel the magnification "pulling" the subject in:




Practically, this means as long as you can physically get the strobes in close enough, that lighting is fairly easy! With dry gloves, the strobes want to be where my hands are! The reduction in distance between the front of the dome and the subject helps with colour and sharpness.

For more general wide angle, I took the following series of shots. These were all shot at 1/60th which may be a bit slow, and I am getting used to the set up-so please don't take them as anything like definitive! The full image looks like this:



I've then taken crops of the left hand bottom corner, and zoomed them to 100%

1/60th at f5



1/60th at f6.3



1/60th at f7.1



1/60th at f8



1/60th at f9



1/60th at f10



Corner sharpness seems to suffer at large apertures!

I'll do some more playing-please note that these aren't definitive.

New Zen 100mm Dome port

Today I was lucky enough to be using the new Zen 100mm dome port today. It is definately softer in the corners than a big dome, but it's small size lets you get real close! Thanks to Alex for all his help with this

I teamed it up with a Tokina 10-17mm lens and a Kenko 1.4 x teleconverter, and could really see the magnification's effect on the subject. Lighting is critical though-my Inon strobes when correctly placed, didn't really leave enough room for my dry gloves!

The ability to get the subject so close is a definate advantage in terms of colour in green water. The subjects are much more vibrant out of the camera than they would be with a bigger dome etc.

While I was shooting, the sun went in, and I found that as I stopped down, the corner sharpness got worse!

Water temp was a cool 4 degrees!

Red Sea-Schooling fish safari

I'm putting together a photography specific liveaboard trip to the Northern Red Sea in July this year.

At this time of year, large schools are forming around Ras Mohamed, which should provide some fantastic opportunities! It is at about this time that the fish move from Fisherman’s bank (off Jackfish Alley) to Shark Reef, Ras Mohamed. It is also when the pelagic blacktip sharks can turn up to add a bit of extra excitement! We have chartered the boat MV Orchid, and are planning for a maximum of 10 people on board. As it is our charter, we will operate on a reactive itinerary, basically going where the action is!

Orchid is re-fitting, and should have camera rinse tanks and camera tables installed by this trip.

The dates are 4th-11th July, 6 nights on board, with the last night in a hotel. The trip is from and to Sharm el Sheikh, which is well served with flights from Europe and further afield.

The trip cost is £(UKP)750, excluding flights. This will include all accommodation, all food and drink (non alcoholic) on board the boat, transfers to and from the airport and all diving. I can also organize flights if people would like me to do so. For those of you in the Northern UK, flights ex Manchester are £399.

If you are interested, would like more information, or to book(!) please let me know.

Embedding slideshows

I've been doing a lot of looking, reading and hopefully learning about the ways that you can integrate blogs, twitter and in this case, my Smugmug web site at adamhanlon.com In particular, wetpixel publisher, Eric Cheng (www.echeng.com) and contributors Cor Bosman (underwa.ter.net/) and Tony Wu (www.tonywublog.com) have unwittingly provided me with ideas and inspiration! Now all I need is time!

Cor has embedded a slideshow of one of his Smugmug galleries, and seeing the results, it looks great. So I thought I would try and do the same! This is a slideshow of a fantastic underwater adventure at the Farne Islands last September, when we were the center of attention for some very rowdy seals! I hope you enjoy it!