hi everyone, my question is about macro shooting underwater and in general ability to attach lenses to a digital camera system.

first of all is this true about macro lenses: they let you shoot close up pictures from a distance ~something about a feet or more~ so that you don’t scare the critters but capture nice, detailed photos. in a way are macro lenses are zoom lenses with small field of vision????

and what kind of lenses are we talking about here, for instance i’m hearing about wet or dry lenses in the forums. for my compact Canon Powershot system, i guess i have to buy a wet lens (well, assuming i find a compatible one). and these wet lenses have to be a lot more expensive than a dry one since they have to be rugged.

so is it true that if a photographer is interested in expanding his system, he might better go with a third party casing with a large port?

thanks a lot, being an amateur UW photographer your answers will give me a lot of good insight about my next upgrade and future work.
seber

hello seber,

the difference between dry and wet lenses is that you mount
the dry lense on the camera and then put the camera in the
housing whereas the wet lense is mounted on the housing
and can be attached/detached underwater while diving. The
later one means more flexibility, but maybe some quality
reduction.

the port question is depeding on the lense you use. Actually
it’s not always about getting a bigger port its about getting
the best port for the used lense. So you will need a dome
port if you want to should wide angle and a flat port for
macro.

ciao Lars

thanks a lot lars. this will definitely give me a starting point. i’ll do some surfing over the net for lenses and see if i can have a wet lens i can adopt for my powershot system.

by the way, maybe a silly question but i need to clarify this, what is the difference between using a macro lens and using the basic zoom feature of the camera? i know that at close distances, you won’t be able to focus on your subject with the basic zoom. is macro lens useful to solve that problem?

thanks a lot.
seber

p.s: it seems like our previous forum entries have disappeared, and once again i’m flotsam . is this something temporary by any chance?

actually I’m quite not sure if there is real difference between
both type of lenses. What you need to understand is that
every zoom lense will have poorer optic quality than a fixed
size lense as the number of optic elements are much higher
in a zoom lense, which means more refraction, reflection and
other possible distortions.

Another point may be that the macro lense has a more
narrow closeup distance, but this might vary between
different lenses and can be altered by close-up diopters.

/lars

ps: as we migrated to forum and changed the forum structure
we didn’t move the old entries to the new board. instead the
old posts will be stored within an archive. As the number of
posts are calculated from the current forum posts we all start
from the scratch again. I hope that isn’t to bad…