Underwater camera technology

I’ve never owned a 35mm film camera with an underwater housing. Given that I have to concentrate on dry land to make sure I don’t chop peoples’ heads off in the photo, taking a camera underwater was going to be a pointless exercise for me.  Never mind the expense, preparation time, weight and hassle, I was only ever going to end up with partial, nearly shots of my intended subject.  Not for me the Nik V and the like or counting the precious shots on the film.  I have a set of childhood photos which are peppered with shots of the clothes I was wearing and miss my posed, smiling face. My dad set the family standard for photography! I have recognised my limitations and therefore I do not possess a matching underwater portfolio of partial shots with seals, nudibranchs or urchins, or in the worst case yet another bit of seaweed or rockface.

The rise of digital cameras has been a bonus for me both above and below the water.  As a parent I’m fine with letting my kids off to play with a camera, knowing that I won’t be paying Boots a small fortune to develop two photos of the wedding reception and 22 out of focus photos of the tablecloths, carpet and the back of my son’s eye (well it can be hard to get the camera the right way round!).  Digital cameras have solved this….take as many photos as you like and then use the handy delete button. I don’t miss the sympathetic and slightly patronising look from the man behind the counter as he hands over a packet of 6x4 prints where 75% of them are stickered to advise me to focus carefully, avoid putting fingers over the flash etc. Digital cameras; remove memory card, review shots, delete rubbish, save to file with a vaguely memorable name. Job done!

So now I do have an underwater camera…. I do concentrate, I do try and line everything up, but if I fail then I don’t need to pay the photo developers for the privilege of finding out. To be honest, I know I will never publish a book of my underwater photos and I am in awe of those who manage to get some amazing shots. I lack time, patience and skill. My father taught me all he knows!

My latest toy is an HD video camera in a housing. The little LCD screen on the back helps me aim it in generally the right direction and so far things are looking promising. I’ve had some great recreational dives with year with the camera, carried out some marine surveys and been documenting wreck sites. I have hit a slight snag as now I need to learn to edit my video.  I see this as similar to deleting the frames where I let go of the camera to check my handset and gauges, but forgot to turn the camera off, or even where I just let go of the camera and it floated up on its lanyard for a bit.

Purists will tell me to weight the housing, but my policy of letting my camera float saved everything earlier this year.  A nice spell of calm weather meant we dived all four wrecks on Abu Nahas in the Red Sea. On dive 2 my camera wasn’t there when I reached for it, and I assumed I’d left it in the RIB, but when I got back to the surface there was no camera waiting.  The crew were great, we searched for 20 minutes over the site.  Other divers started to surface and we abandoned my camera to pick them up.  A few minutes more searching and we started back to the boat, with me lamenting that I hadn’t downloaded the photos from my sister’s hen party from the card. Nearly a half a mile from the wreck we found my floaty housing bobbing along.  It had been lost for nearly 2 hours! So in my book, floaty is good.
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That’s not always the case though. I guided a party of visiting divers on the wreck of the SS Liverpool this summer. I dropped down the shot marvelling at the 20+ metres of vis and turned to find a totally panicked wide-eyed diver behind me. His floating handle on his little video camera had pulled the lanyard off his wrist on his journey down the shot. He caught it before it floated away, but the lanyard became knotted around his regulator hose.  On a 40m wreck dive, with a hint of narcosis this wasn’t looking like a great situation. In his case, a floaty housing was definitely bad! I stopped filming and disentangled him, put his camera back on his wrist and the rest of the dive continued without incident. I hope he’s put weights on his housing now!