Not a huge fan of my GoPro

[MaxBottomtime]

Shooting a full frame underwater has increased my enjoyment of diving over the past ten years. I used to shoot video all the time as well as point and shoot. I was never satisfied with my work. I'm still trying to improve, but my dives are planned around what I want to photograph.

 

[tursiops]

Since the OP already owns a nice full frame camera and I assume lenses, it would make sense to get a housing for it. A 100mm macro lens and 16-36 wide angle is really all he would need.

Depends on what you mean by sense! He can buy a whole TG-6 plus its housing, and probably a strobe, for about what it costs to house his DSLR.

 

[Barmaglot]

Shooting a full frame underwater has increased my enjoyment of diving over the past ten years. I used to shoot video all the time as well as point and shoot. I was never satisfied with my work. I'm still trying to improve, but my dives are planned around what I want to photograph.

Right, but you're a dive professional with thousands of dives, and you have used a smaller, simpler camera before graduating to the big stuff. Getting good results out of those large cameras requires both good diving skills and good photography skills, as they don't exactly hold your hand when it comes to defining settings. In the hands of a newer diver, a small, compact camera with good automation is much more likely to deliver good results than a potentially much more capable rig that is outside their personal capabilities to manage.

 

[bvbellomo]

Since the OP already owns a nice full frame camera and I assume lenses, it would make sense to get a housing for it. A 100mm macro lens and 16-36 wide angle is really all he would need.

OP here - that was a really nice full frame camera 12 years ago. If I were investing $4000 into underwater photography, building around a camera body that goes for $400 on ebay because I already have it is not absolutely necessary.

Regardless of my skill and willingness to spend, I want to be a scuba diver who happens to take pictures - not a photographer that happens to go under water. I'd much rather carry a TG-6 (and maybe the GoPro too) than a huge cumbersome and complicated setup - especially on some of the more challenging dives with high current and narrow spaces.

There is nothing wrong with photography being the reason you scuba dive, and maybe I'll be there after my 12th trip to Indonesia, but right now, I just want to dive.

 

[bvbellomo]

What about something like the SeaLife DC2000? Am I really better with a TG6 if I have to buy a $300 housing?

 

[Barmaglot]

What about something like the SeaLife DC2000? Am I really better with a TG6 if I have to buy a $300 housing?

I consider the DC2000 to be rather pointless. It's the Sony RX100 III sensor behind a lens that has a fixed focal length that it rather useless underwater, backed by questionable electronics - if you shoot RAW (as you should underwater), the file write time between shots is egregious. The waterproofing is kind of useless as you still need to house it to go to scuba depths. The SeaLife Micro series cameras at least have the advantage of being sealed units and thus (theoretically) impervious to flooding, but a DC2000 relies on o-rings just like everything else. The strength of the TG series is in their macro capabilities - the built-in lens, rather uniquely among compacts, is capable of macro (1:1 representation of subject on sensor) without add-on diopters, and with the small sensor that it has, you can fill it with some very small stuff. Better still, with the small sensor and dense pixels, you get much more depth of field on larger subjects (think an inch or two large) than large-sensor cameras, as you can step back away from 1:1 or stronger magnification, producing shots that they're often not even capable of doing.

 

[bvbellomo]

Thinking about shooting underwater, I feel I should have a larger sensor to capture as much light as possible, whether using a strobe or natural light.

I'd be around $750 for a TG3+housing. I am tempted to skip that for an EOS RP, about $4000 gets me everything I need to take it underwater. I'd take only 1 camera on vacation (I want a SLR for above water) and I could sell everything I have now towards the bill and get a considerable upgrade for above water.

 

[tursiops]

SeaLife DC2000

It has been discontinued. For a reason, I suspect.
If you are not going below 50 ft, the TG-6 doesn't need a housing...but it is a good idea anyway, if only for protection from getting battered.

 

[bvbellomo]

I guess my question is how much better is a TG-6 than my GoPro for still images? And how much better is EOS RP than the TG6? And how bulky is a EOS RP with a housing and a strobe?

Difficulty of use doesn't really come into play. A full DSLR is much more complicated, but a camera I use all the time is going to be much simpler to operate. I don't think I've ever used by GoPro above water, at least not on purpose.

 

[Barmaglot]

Thinking about shooting underwater, I feel I should have a larger sensor to capture as much light as possible, whether using a strobe or natural light.

While this is the conventional wisdom in land shooting, underwater we have a number of additional factors that invalidate it. Most of the shooting is either ultrawide/fisheye or macro, and in both cases, large sensor cameras have drawbacks that go a long way towards offsetting their advantages. In ultrawide, shooting through a dome, you are capturing a curved virtual image created by the interface of water, dome glass and air, and the curvature of this image tends to fall out of the large-sensor cameras' limited depth of field, producing soft corners. The domes are also large, heavy, expensive, difficult to travel with and maneuver underwater. In case of macro, when you have a subject that is significantly smaller than your sensor, you have to magnify it by a lot with close-up lenses, and this limits your depth of field. You may get great detail on the small part of the subject that is in focus, but the rest of it will be lost in the blur, while a TG-6 will capture the entire thing.

You also don't need to capture all the light - you need just enough to properly expose the background (which may be nothing at all, if you want to keep the background black) then add enough strobe light to properly expose the foreground. I was at Richelieu Rock in Thailand just yesterday, shooting my Sony A6300 with 16-50mm lens and Retra Pro strobes, and I was cycling between 6% and full power on the strobes and f/8 to f/36 on the lens, with shutter speeds between 1/50 and 1/160, all depending on the shot I wanted to take.