GEAR TESTS: Nauticam EMWL Extended Macro Wide Lens Underwater Review

CRISTIAN DIMITRIUS Professional Filmmaker

The Nauticam EMWL relay lens has become one of my favorite sets of UW optics to use. This Extended Macro Wide Lens allows me to shoot macro wide-angle images, which means that it puts us on the tiny animals' perspective. It's a whole new way to tell stories and multiplies our creative possibilities. I used it paired with the Canon 100mm and the Canon R5C and had some fun shooting the tiny creatures of Little Cayman. With four different objective lenses, 130º, 100º,  60º and 160º angle-of-view, that can be exchanged underwater, I had the flexibility to get different frames for my video stories, like wide, medium and close ups of the same subject, something that before was very hard to do. The images were very sharp, had good contrast and the R5C autofocus worked extremely well with the EMWL. It's a totally new perspective and new world to explore to tell new UW stories. 

Jim Decker CEO: Backscatter Underwater Video & Photo

The Nauticam EMWL lens stands for Extended Macro Wide Lens. Like its names suggests, it is a macro lens that has a wide angle of view. There are different options for angle of coverage but for this trip I shot the 160 degree optic which is pretty close to a full fisheye. The idea is that the minimum focus of the lens is right on the element so one can get really close to their foreground subject and have perspective distortion make the foreground massive compared to things in the background. It can create crazy scenes where you might have a small subject like a blenny in the foreground but with a diver in the background, which you could never pull off with a normal macro lens.

It's not easy to shoot as I had to find scenes where I could have a macro subject with a wide background. I found that for the extreme close macro, manual focus worked best.

For me this lens is so much fun to shoot because of the results and I look forward to shooting it a lot more.