Olympus TG6 focus problems underwater

I have an Olympus TG6 and have placed it in a seafrog underwater housing. Often my images are out of focus and I wonder if anyone has advice about how better to improve my in focus hit rate.

What focus mode do you use?? Spot might be the best since it might be picking up things that housing …I am sure that any such house has a performance hit …maybe its the housing…in shallow water without the case does it focus okay?? All just guesses

Thanks for the suggestions. I feel spot may be difficult while diving as it is hard enough pointing the camera at moving fish in the first instance. I used f8 which was the smallest aperture in the hope of getting focus forgiveness. I am considering trying to work out a manual focus point as a compact camera should have a lot of DOF. I will be doing some scuba and snorkelling later this month so I hopefully will get better results then.

I looked at the site for the case…they are pretty substantial…THey did have a blog I wonder if you could post and maybe get a tip there from a user or support…thats a pretty popular little camera our outdoor stuff and snokelling…

Good suggestion. I will do that.

You can find good advices for the TG-6 undewater here Olympus TG-6 Best Underwater Camera Settings - Underwater Photography - Backscatter and here Olympus TG-5 and TG-6 Underwater Settings - Underwater Photography Guide.

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My impression is that the TG cameras are normally used ‘as is’ by divers (within its stated operational limits). Are you sure you really need that housing?

Olympus replaced my first TG6 free of charge despite it being out of warranty because I went to 11.7 metres and it flooded. It claims 15 metres, but I am playing safe and using a housing from now on. Besides that I dive below 15 metres. I believe for snorkelling I may be best just using as is, but there is still a risk of a seal failing and flooding the camera, so an underwater housing is a good safety and the camera floats rather than sinks if you drop it.

@Philippe I am watching the video and it has some great tips on focusing, locking focus, focus peaking and setting up custom settings that should help. Also some of my shots may suffer from slow shutter speeds and this camera allows me to set minimum shutter speeds. So hopefully some of these suggestions will work for my next dive. I like the idea of focus lock because I suspect I can pick a reasonable distance to give suitable DOF range. I appreciate your help with this. Thanks

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Not sure how noisy that sensor may be but perhaps pushing the exposure/ISO up in-camera and then compensating for noise in post? I’d rather have a noisy image that was sharp than a less-noisy image that was blurry… :slight_smile:

I have discovered how to ensure the slowest shutter speed is at least 1/125th or whatever I set. This will help. Darktable is handling the noise pretty well. Blur is a bigger sin than noise.

Problem potentially solved. Olympus have a really stupid and misleading f8 aperture setting. It is actually f2.8, but they achieve the light transmission of f8 by putting an ND filter in the light path. So I get all the disadvantage of shooting at f8 such as slow shutter speeds and high ISO but no advantage of increased DOF. Next time I go diving I will set the camera to f2.8 and I am confident I will get better shots. This will also affect my terrestrial shots because I have often set f8 in the mistaken belief I was getting increased DOF.

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