New to underwater photography, I'm lost! (Sony RX100 / A6500)

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Hi all,

First off, happy new year :) It's been a while since my last post!

So I finally bought all my gear and tested it a bit (but just at home, not underwater yet). I decided to go with a cheap option, as the incremental difference will not be significant enough to me, and here's what I bought:

-Sony A6000 bundle with the 16-50 and the 55-210
-The sony 10-18 F4
-The seafrogs housing for A6000/6300/6500 (sold with adapters so compatible with all cameras)
-Sea & sea strobe YS-01
-An optical cable for the strobe
-A package with tray & arm from Aditech, where I bought the flash (I don't recommend this site though!)
-Close up Lense Inon UCL 165M67

Here are my thoughts so far (sorry it's a bit of a mess) as a beginner in photography. Again, I haven't been diving with it yet and I'm not an expert (it's pretty long, short summary at the end):

- Picture quality with the A6000 is great, very sharp, a bit of noise (even at low ISO like 400 or 800) but depends on your sensibility, I didn't notice it too much, my brother who was a pro photographer noticed it right away (but still said it's acceptable). Camera is very small and easy too handle, menus are OK (I saw a lot of complaints on it) - very happy with it, especially for 450 eur!
- Not related to underwater but the 55-210 is not enough for what I want to do. It costs and weigh almost nothing so it's fine I'll take it with me, but to get a proper close up of a bird at the top of a 20m Tree, you probably need a 400mm zoom (on this sensor, so equivalent to 600+ on FF). Didn't fully appreciate that when I bought it. But if I want to buy that now it's very expensive and heavy, so I won't :)
- Happy with the built quality of the seafrogs case, the water leak detector works, the access to the controls is totally fine. These guys are serious, delivery was very fast. Comes with extra o-rings and lub. Tried it in my bath tub, no leaks.
- The tray and arm bundle from Aditech is really ******, screws are not easy to turn, quality doesn't look great - let's see how it handles in the water but I don't have high expectations for it (and the website had a very slow and super overpriced delivery, not buying there again even if customer service was responsive).
- Inon UCL 165M67 : probably shouldn't have bought that. Works really well, but it's a propper macro zoom. The focus area is within milimeters, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it underwater. Any animal you take with it will have eyes/head in focus but rest of the body blurry, I know some people love this, it's not really my style. To take close ups of nudibranches or small stuff underwater, I think I'll be fine with the zoom of the 16-50mm lense. Also, and this is incredibly stupid, this wet lense doesn't come with a leash or anything to attach it (not even a hole), so even if you can theoretically attach and detach it from your case during a dive, you need to think of somewhere safe to store it without scratching it.
- Sea & sea YS-01: Happy with it, did a few macro shots with the close up lense (in TTL mode), I liked this model because it has the focus light which is helpful. It's waaay smaller and lighter than what I thought it would be, I should have bought 2 it's very easy to store in a bag. I see how 1 strobe will be a problem underwater if you don't want to create any shades on your subjects.


So all in all, happy with my choices. But if I had to go back, I'd buy 2 strobes instead of the close up lense. And find a different brand than Aditech for the tray+arm.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me on the topic. Will come back if I change my mind about something after diving, I'm leaving in a week to go diving !
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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