I have finally gone through all my photos from my trip to Lembeh in April this year. I stayed at NAD Lembeh again and was very happy with service and I highly recommend them. This was my second time there shooting with the NEX 5 except this time I had some new toys to play with. For this trip I had two strobes instead of one, the 30mm macro lens and subsee +10 diopter as well as the inon ucl-165 diopter.
The visability wasn't as good as last year but I saw even more critters than last time! Unfortunately no hairy octopus this time around. I mostly shot with 18-55mm using the subsee +10 diopter but on the last day I switched to the 30mm macro. On reflection I should have used the 30mm a bit more during the trip as there was a lot of subjects that it would have good for.
The 18-55mm lens with the subsee +10 was good but slow focusing and sometimes inaccurate focusing but I would quite often focus lock on something with a lot of contrast and then just rock the camera housing backwards and forwards until focus was obtained. For some of the smaller (less than 1cm in some cases) critter I used inon ucl-165 and subsee +10 stacked. While this worked the image quality did suffer and the focusing distance was extremely close.
In the end I was getting quite frustrated with the setup, especially when watching another diver with his 60mm macro on an SLR easily taking photos. Macro on NEX system is just not it's strong point and it looks like it will take a long time for ideal macro lens to come out Sony just seem to be interested in releasing the same focal length lenses. This has made me to decide to change over to an SLR, and I managed to get the Nauticam NA-D7000V for a good price on the weekend.
My pictures from the trip can be seen at Lembeh 2012 - a set on Flickr
chromodoris-elisabethina-1 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
cuttle_in_xenia by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
soft-coral-crab-2 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
---------- Post added ----------
Here are some sample of stacking the inon and the subsee.
hairy-shrimp-1 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
tiger-shrimp-2 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
The visability wasn't as good as last year but I saw even more critters than last time! Unfortunately no hairy octopus this time around. I mostly shot with 18-55mm using the subsee +10 diopter but on the last day I switched to the 30mm macro. On reflection I should have used the 30mm a bit more during the trip as there was a lot of subjects that it would have good for.
The 18-55mm lens with the subsee +10 was good but slow focusing and sometimes inaccurate focusing but I would quite often focus lock on something with a lot of contrast and then just rock the camera housing backwards and forwards until focus was obtained. For some of the smaller (less than 1cm in some cases) critter I used inon ucl-165 and subsee +10 stacked. While this worked the image quality did suffer and the focusing distance was extremely close.
In the end I was getting quite frustrated with the setup, especially when watching another diver with his 60mm macro on an SLR easily taking photos. Macro on NEX system is just not it's strong point and it looks like it will take a long time for ideal macro lens to come out Sony just seem to be interested in releasing the same focal length lenses. This has made me to decide to change over to an SLR, and I managed to get the Nauticam NA-D7000V for a good price on the weekend.
My pictures from the trip can be seen at Lembeh 2012 - a set on Flickr
chromodoris-elisabethina-1 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
cuttle_in_xenia by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
soft-coral-crab-2 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
---------- Post added ----------
Here are some sample of stacking the inon and the subsee.
hairy-shrimp-1 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr
tiger-shrimp-2 by Byron.Fowles, on Flickr