Doug said:
The wider lenses force you in close, with a very different feeling of immediacy to the result. If you're close enough. I just had a scenario float through my imagination: You're in scuba gear sneaking along the bottom, and as you surface next one of the wading birds it breaks for the sky and you get a great close-in shot! Hmmm I guess you'd need your Nikonos...
Hum, been there, done that.
I'm not sure if a Nik classifies as a RF camera as it doesn't have a rangefinder....all the focusing is done by guestimation. Try taking a shot of a small fish with a 80mm wide open, fairly close, guessing the distance! Yup, almost impossible (which explains why there were so many used Nik 80mm lenses available secondhand).
Or drifting along, seeing a nice bit of fan coral coming up on the wall, guessing the distance, looking down and pre-setting the distance on the Nik, looking up, realising you've drifted closer, looking down, re-setting the focus - and then finning like crazy to stop yourself from crashing into the fan! Why they never made a Nik with RF focusing I don't know...it would have made everyone's lives orders of magnitudes easier. I threw mine away in disgust.
But there is a similarity...the trend u/w is also for wideangle. This is for several reasons to do with the way that water absorbs and scatters light. The closer you are the better the picture (more colourful, less murk, and the flash reaches) and hence the desire for WA. Typically pictures are "wide angle close up", where the main bit of interest (e.g. anemone with Nemo family gazing out) is in the foreground lit by the strobe...typically you'd be a foot or two away...and then the background reef and water column is lit by natural light with a nice starburst of sun at the top. If you have a well-trained dive buddy you get them to swim over and block the sun, to give a nice starburst effect. This places the subject in context of its surroundings in a way that is also effective with WA above water.
I use a 15mm underwater. Not, not the CV 15mm, but part of an Olympus kit
🙂 Not sure how waterproof the Bessa is
🙂
David
