Jantina is a professional dutch wedding and corporate photographer, that loves to dive, when she is not working on an assignment somewhere around the world. Recently she picked up the Fantasea house for her Sony A6500 and has kindly agreed to share her experience:

As my diving slowly progressed and I got more confident in the water I started taking pictures. At first, I started diving with only a GoPro, after that I bought a small tray with a small set of lights for the GoPro.

I loved how I could snap pictures of things I saw underwater. I even liked to take a picture of a cloud of dust I kicked up with my fins because of my pour buoyancy. I liked it all. But the photos never turned out quite the way I wanted because the GoPro is not manually adjustable.

In my daily life, I am a photographer. I shoot weddings, portraits and corporate photography. After some time diving with the GoPro underwater, it wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted to shoot “real” pictures with a camera I could control, just like I do in my professional photography.

It was time to buy a real underwater housing for a “real” camera. As I was searching the internet and visiting some online shops I got really confused. The offer was huge and I did not know what to choose.

When I contacted Lars Stenholt Kirkegaard from “Fotografit” he suggested a Skype session to discuss my needs and wishes. With me living in the Netherlands and Fotografit being a Danish company, the Skype session was a perfect solution.

Lars explained what I needed for my wishes and the possibilities for the budget I had. And it was not what I wanted to hear!

I thought I wanted a housing for my DSLR. I love my Nikon D750. I have a beautiful set of lenses for it. Lars explained to me that this was not the combination to take diving.

So I checked out the camera’s he was suggesting. One of them was the Sony A6500 in combination with the Fantasea housing.

A friend of mine used the A6500 for filming and I could try it for some days. I liked it!

I would not use it for my wedding photography, but none the less: I liked it very much.

The Sony A6500 with APS-C format and 24.2 megapixel suits me very well. It is easy to use, has a ton of settings but above all things: I can use it fully manual in an easy way. It focusses very fast and the images are sharp.

I am using the 16-50 mm kit lens on the camera. At this moment I do not have the best lighting but even when I am shooting the camera in low light I am very pleased.

Jantina with her Fantasea housing. Photo: Marco Mosterman

• The Sony in combination with the Fantasea housing is small and lightweight. It is easy to travel with and easy to take on a boat dive.
• The housing is sturdy and feels really reliable and durable.
• It offers access to all the essential controls of the Sony so I can use it in full manual mode.
• With its big buttons and turning wheels, I can easily change settings. I am mostly diving in cold water with thick gloves so this is a must-have for me.
• It has a good, easy grip in the front and back on the right side of the housing, so it fits in my hand really well. I am using it with the expandable shutter release so it is even more easy to reach the shutter with thick gloves.
• I choose a wide angle wetlens and macro which I can change underwater. I did that just a few times, but it was easy enough.

The beauty of this camera/housing combination is that there is so much possibility to grow in underwater photography. I stepped in using it fully manual, but you could also start to use it on auto settings. For me the next step is buying a good set of light/flashes, so I can expand my knowledge on that part of underwater photography.

I am even starting to shoot a little video, there is so much to explore underwater with the Fantasea camera housing!

Lions Mane Jelly. Photo: Jantina Scheltema

You can see more of Jantinas work and read her travel blog (in Dutch) on her website:
https://jantinascheltema.nl/

The post Fantasea with Sony A6500 appeared first on The FOTOGRAFIT Blog.

By guest writers Lisa Svensen and Mikkel Noe-Nygaard, both Danish national champions in underwater photo.

The 17th World Championship of underwater photography took place on Tenerife, Spain from the 17th of September to 22th of September 2019.

20 nations and 34 photographers where participating in the championship where Denmark was represented by two photographer Lisa Svensen and Mikkel Noe-Nygaard and their two assistants and models Jan Carstensen and Rune Boesgaard Platz.

Team Denmark, from the left Jan Carstensen (assistant-model), Mikkel Noe-Nygaard (photographer), Kerim Sabuncuoglu (president of CMAS Visual comitee), Luciano Cedres (president of Fedecas), Lisa Svensen (photographer) and Rune Boesgaard Platz (assistant-model). Notice the beautiful color coordinated uniforms sponsored by Fotografit.

The championship is divided in five categories where each photographer can hand in one picture:

• Fish
• Close-up
• Wide angle without diver
• Wide angle with diver
• Theme

The theme changes from competition to competition and this year the theme was Cartilaginous fish (Rays and sharks).

Competing in underwater photography is a very special discipline in photography.  The pictures are taken during four dives on four different dive sites over two days. It is not allowed to edit the pictures; they are handed in to the officials straight from the camera immediately after each day’s dives. There is a limit of 250 pictures per day and its not allowed to delete any pictures on the card.

This means that every shot must count and great care must be taken to reduce backscatter and ensure spot on exposure as nothing can be saved in post processing.

Drama in the harbour

On the second day of the competition the Spanish team was disqualified. The disqualification was decided by the CMAS organization as it was discovered that the Spanish team had a start pressure of 260 bar in their tanks as opposed to the 190ish bar everybody else had. Because of the handing of the disqualification, the process of handing in pictures was delayed up to 4 hours. The Danish team finally handed in their pictures around 4 am in the morning on the 21th.

Denmark, Norway and Sweden were patiently waiting to handle in their pictures for the competition

The pictures are judged by a jury of seven. This year the jury consisted of Kay Burn Lim (President, Australia), Danny van Belle (Belgium), Adam Hanlon (Ireland), Magnus Lundgren (Sweden), Viktor Lyagushkin – (Russian Federaion), Michael Aw (Australia) and Nicholas Samaras (Greece).

Gold, silver and bronze are awarded in each of the five categories.

The winners are…

Lisa Svensen and Mikkel Noe-Nygaard both made good results. Lisa and her assistant Jan got a bronze medal in the theme category, and Mikkel and his assistant Rune got fourth place in the same category. Because of some challenges with the jury at the competition site, both photographers went back to Denmark in the belief that they had gotten a 6th and 7th place respectively. A couple of weeks after their return it was announced that they actually won a 3rd and 4th place – The best danish placements ever. Lisa and Jan are still waiting to receive their medal.

Their pictures can be seen below:

Photo by Lisa Svensen, Bronze medal CMAS World Championship 2019 – Theme category. Canon 5d Mark IV, Nauticam Housing

Photo by Mikkel Noe-Nygaard, fourth place CMAS World Championship 2019 – Theme category. Canon 5d Mark IV, Hugyfot Housing

All winning pictures can be seen here: https://www.cmas.org/visual/15-20.10.2019-underwater-photo-world-championship-tenerife-canarias-spain 

The post World Championship of underwater photography Tenerife 2019 appeared first on The FOTOGRAFIT Blog.

Author: Mikkel Noe-Nygaard
Content provider FOTOGRAFIT.eu
Several times winner of Danish UWP Championship.

For a while I have had my looks on one of the lights from ID (i-Divesite) as they strike a very good balance between quality, features and price.

The Venom 50 RGB focus and video light provides a blindingly beautiful smooth 5000 lumen output with a very high (90) CRI value making it very good for video but also super versatile for shooting stills.

Features

Pushing your ISO up a little bit you can actually use it instead of your strobes making positioning your light a breeze as what you see is what you get. It’s also powerful enough to use as a backlight or off camera light when getting creative in your wide angle shots. With a super high Color Rendering Index of 90 the quality of light and color reproduction is unsurpassed from a LED light.

If you need to impress your dive buddies with features the Venom 50 RGB has a party mode – turning the super simple dial/button the Venom can cycle between red, yellow, green, blue and purple spotlights although I found little use for this feature underwater.

Lastly it just keeps on burning – I easily got an hour at full burn and when remembering to turn the power down it lasts an easy two to three hours.

Did I really NEED a new light?

AFter 6 years and hundreds of dives the battery pack in my trusty old Sola 600 only provided about 8 minutes of light on full burn.

I love the old Sola from Light & Motion because you can actually charge it while it was still mounted on the house. The build quality, form factor and ease of use is almost unbeatable and one fairly intuitive magnetic contact to switch the light on and off, change modes and intensities keeps everything nice and simple.

It has a relatively low 600 lumen output and only has 3 power steps. Even on the lowest setting it would occasionally interfere when doing wide angle closeups in very dark settings (think either St. Johns caves in Egypt or anywhere in Denmark). It also lacks a spot function for signaling or pointing out critters for fellow photographers.

I could of course get a new battery, but ‘broken’ equipment is always a welcome opportunity to research new acquisitions and as mentioned above I did have some things about the Sola that wasn’t ideal.

I’m happy to say that the Venom 50 RGB is a very worthy successor!

Venom 50 RGB – Dislikes

• Only one minor thing – The mount on the light is attached to the battery, so in order to charge the Venom you have to remove the whole light from the housing instead of just unscrewing the battery pack.

Venom 50 RGB – Likes

• Crazy much beautiful smooth light
• Simple and intuitive controls with one simple dial/button
• Red night light and Spotlight function
• Loooong burntime

Other options 

ID produces other lights that I also considered

• Venom 60 RGB
  More light (6000 lumen) – lower CRI
• Black star BS30
  UV light – lower output (3000 lumen) – Cheaper

The post Venom 50 RGB review appeared first on The FOTOGRAFIT Blog.

The new Canon G7X Mk 3 is the new frontrunner in the G7X series of compact cameras and features a stylish new update not just in looks but also technically and mechanically making it a versatile force to be reckoned with.

The new 20.1 Megapixel 1.0-inch stacked CMOS sensor powered by the new DIGIC-8 processor allows for 20 frames per second full-resolution bursts in high speed shooting mode.

Resolution in images is much the same as the Mk 2 but the update comes in the speed and processing of images. With the new CR3 format the Mark 3 can handle 55 RAW or 118 JPEG frames in 20 fps mode, and up to 70 frames in 30 fps RAW burst mode.

The Canon Mk 3 also allows focus bracketing that enables you to do focus stacking resulting in a much increased depth of field. This may be particular relevant for macro shots of immobile subjects.

Introduced on the Mk 3 are 4K video at 29.97 frames per second, or 1080p at 120 frames per second (uncropped).

USB-C charging is available so you can keep shooting wile charging via Powerbank although this will only apply above water.

The Mark 3 features Bluetooth control and you get the options of streaming live on fx. youtube.com directly from the camera if it’s connected to a hotspot or Wi-Fi.

Major improvements on the Canon G7X MK3

Conclusion

The G7X Mark 3 is the faster and more versatile choice with 4k video, way faster shutter, longer exposure time, bigger buffer and higher iso.

The iso and higher video frame rate will probably be the features that will make the most impact for your underwater shooting.

Available housings

Currently only Nauticam offers a housing for this beautiful compact powerhouse but other options will soon be available.

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