Progress with my Olympus C7070

[Helen F H]

Well, its been a while since I was over here, mainly because I seem to have been working 14 hours a day for the last 6 months and can only really check one forum at a time, but this week we have a week off (hurrah!) and I get to play with the broadband connection

I bought my Olympus c-7070 last year and fell in love with it immediately – it may not be the most modern camera out there, but it is certainly the best one I have ever owned. I have the standard Olympus housing for it too, but may save up and get an ikelite one if I can find one second hand anywhere.

I love macro photography both on land and in water. I tend to find I notice things I never saw at the time in the photographs and have a real liking for textures and tiny patterns.

I bought a wide angle lens and strobe for it a couple of months ago, but I seldom get to go diving so my learning has been slow to say the very least.

Before the strobe and really getting to grips with it, this is the kind of image I would be getting – ok but not stunning. Nowhere near close enough for my liking.



However, a little practice and a whole heap of luck and I get something like this, taken on the same dive as above on the Lunokhods in Shetland:



I do get to play with the wide angle lens though, on a little wreck called the Fraoch Ban (I did wish I had chosen a different wreck though as it was a macro wet dream down there!). I didn’t realise at the time, but you get the “looking through the porthole” effect if you don’t zoom it in just a touch. Ho hum.

Uncropped


Cropped


I decide that the next dive I will take the strobe in, and then never get another dive in Shetland

Back in Scapa, we get a late evening dive on the Karlsruhe and in I go with the strobe chasing after Hazel who is happily blinding things with her new salvo…
No matter what I point it at, the pics are black. Black, with extra black bits and maybe some silt. Out of the 50 pics I took that dive, only one is any good, and even then it has very deep shadow (which I do kind of like, but its not ideal).



This is due to the lack of light not allowing the camera to focus on anything, so I need to pull my finger out and get my little spotting light fettled onto the camera too.

After that I don’t get another dive for a while, the weather isn’t great, the group needs my full attention or I simply do not have time.

Finally I get a dive and decide to take the “epileptic octopus” in with me (arms everywhere). The Kaiserin Scrap Site is a seldom dived pile of wreckage in a nice sheltered bit of the flow. Dropping down to the twisted metal and long round masts sitting on the bottom I really hope I can get some decent piccies, words of advice going round and round and round in my head.









As you can see, these ones seem to have come out ok, with only minor tweeking. I did dive on the F2 the other day too, but it took me a long time to work out that I had been using different settings the previous time, so none of the pictures are really worth showing – I changed the battery just before I went in and did the classic of taking a half empty one out and putting a fully empty one back in! Spent the whole dive waiting for the little battery symbol to go to empty which finally occurred after around 30 mins and only a few piccies as there was a stonking current.

I have found that the underwater modes don’t really work too well sometimes, and the normal settings seem to give better results. The macro (not super macro) setting seems to give really good piccies for close up stuff, although I would like to work out how to set the camera up so the flash will go off with the super macro setting as it gives really fantastic pics on land.

Anyhoo, enough of my ramblings.

Any feedback would be really welcome.

[Cussy]

Helen,
Nice post, thanks for sharing.

What I did for my 7070 was setup 2 "MyModes" - one for macro (low ISO, auto WB) and one for wide angle (ISO of 400, custom WB). This way I could quickly switch between the two. If you search I'm pretty sure I posted more about this a few years back.

I found the underwater mode to be totally useless in green water.

To fire the flash in super-macro mode you need to have it connected via a cable. So if your strobe is a slave strobe then I' afraid it's not possible.
HTH,
Rob