Wide angle lens recommendations

[humanuma]

I seem to have found myself with a Sony a7r3 with the nauticam housing. Don’t ask me how, they just appeared.

I don’t have a background in underwater photo beyond a couple go pro and tg6 fun dives. My roommate, however, is much more knowledgeable and has agreed to be my mentor in this new adventure.

He recommended we start with wide angle. I’ve been instructed pick a lens and snag a dome port, and then we can jump in the water and start messing around.

I dig some digging and also called bluewater photo for advice, and I’ve come up with two options: either the 14mm f/1.8 prime lens or the 16-35 mm f/2.8 zoom lens. The zoom lens is more expensive and I am leaning towards the prime because I just want to stop overthinking and start shooting.

I know I am almost completely ignorant as far as underwater photo goes, so I was hoping for some input on if this would be a good choice, or perhaps any other recommendations? Also, I’m not sure I’ve seen much published photography at 14mm width so if you have any ultra wide photos or comparisons to share that would be great to get a sense of what this lens will capture. Lastly does anyone have experience with bluewater company? Thank you in advance!

 

[Barmaglot]

I'm not sure either of those is an option for you. The port chart for Sea & Sea MDX ML housings, which corresponds to your A7R II, doesn't list these lenses as supported. Also, the f/2.8 aperture adds a thousand dollars to the price of the lens and you wouldn't ever use that aperture underwater - you need to stop down for depth of field when shooting through a dome. The system chart is here:

System Chart for ML Port (for Sony)

www.seaandsea.jp

Your options are either the 28mm f/2.0 prime with fisheye converter and 150mm dome, or 16-35mm f/4 zoom with 240mm dome. The latter is a rectilinear wide-angle - it will keep straight lines straight in your shots, but it requires a large dome and small aperture for good image quality across the frame. The fisheye option will give you a wider overall perspective, and will work with smaller domes and larger apertures, but this particular option (28mm + converter) is known for somewhat mediocre quality, and any fisheye lens will give you significant barrel distortion, which may or may not be an issue. Typically, for wildlife, people prefer fisheye, and for man-made stuff such as wrecks, rectilinear lenses.

 

[Barmaglot]

Okay, since this is an A7R3/Nauticam rather than A7R2/Sea&Sea, the options are radically different. You can go with a 16-35mm (either the old f/4 Zeiss, or the f/2.8GM, or the new f/4 PZ) but this will require a very large dome for good image quality - Nauticam recommend a 250mm one, and that's huge, not to mention expensive at almost three thousand dollars for the port alone. 14mm prime... yeah, you could use it, but the same caveats apply as for 16-35mm, plus you lose zoom. Unless you're heavily into wrecks and want to keep straight lines straight, I would pick between two options:

1. Sony 28-60mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens with N100 Flat Port 45 and WWL-1 wet lens. This will give you a very useful zoom range of 69 through 130 degrees diagonal FoV, with excellent image quality across the frame. With some effort in swapping lenses, it also gives you the ability to shoot wide and macro on the same dive, although this is not as useful in practice as it sounds in theory.

2. Canon 8-15mm f/4 fisheye lens on Metabones adapter with a Kenko 1.4x teleconverter and a Zen 100mm dome or a Nauticam 140mm dome. This is wider than the WWL-1 setup, and somewhat more compact, but lacks the potential reach of WWL-1. Basically, 8-15mm on its own gives you a circular fisheye look at 8mm (full hemisphere projected into a circle on your sensor, surrounded by blackness), and a 180 degree diagonal fisheye at 15mm - you get a 180-degree field of view corner to corner, with the image filling the sensor. Intermediate positions aren't particularly useful, as they just give you part of a circle. However, with 1.4x TC, you lose the circular fisheye, but get the 180-degree diagonal at 11mm, allowing you to tighten the field of view as you zoom in, with 15mm giving an angle of view similar to that of WWL-1 at its widest.

See here for an example comparison between 16-35mm and 28-60mm with water-contact optics:

Between those two setups, I would personally lean towards the WWL-1 one.