Sony A6500 or A7iii to photograph whales underwater?

Barmaglot_07 wrote:

Be careful with planning for wide apertures - when you're shooting in a dome underwater, you're actually shooting a virtual image produced by the dome, and this virtual image is curved and located pretty close to the lens - this makes depth of field a significant challenge, because edges and corners are significantly closer to your lens than the center. Bigger domes alleviate the issue to a degree, but those 230-250mm domes used by full-frame cameras are huge, heavy, and cost thousands of dollars. Fisheye lenses avoid this issue, and they work well with small domes, but there's no native fisheye zoom for E-mount (and no native fisheye at all, unless you count converters for 16/20/28mm primes), and of course there's the fisheye distortion. Nauticam WACP is, by all accounts, awesome, but at $2850 for the housing + $3950 for the port, it represents a very big investment.

Another thing about primes - I've never shot whales, but I imagine that controlling the distance may end up problematic, so you might want to have a useful zoom range, as they might come in close to fill the frame, or they might keep their distance, forcing you to zoom in lest you bring home a memory card full of tiny specs.

Thanks a lot!

I know there are some housings that are extremely expensinve (I'm sure they are completely worth it).

I was thinking of using a prime lens for the added sharpness but I think you are right, a zoom will surely give me more versatility. Unfortunately, there are no fast zooms for the APSC Sony system, I would have to get a lens made for FF.