I was bitten by the SCUBA bug quite late in life (age 55) when I took a resort dive at Sandals in St. Lucia. After the usual quick introduction and pool exercise, our dive master informed us that we would be diving to a maximum depth of 40 feet. "Anyone who wants to go deeper should bring a shovel," he advised. Intriguing thought, but I had enough to worry about with all the gear and paraphernalia dangling about my body, not to mention the weight belt and tanks – I could hardly walk.
In spite of all that, as soon as I got home from that trip I signed up at my local dive shop for an open water course, and pretty soon I was diving again. And what a joy it was. Even though I was struggling with buoyancy control, constantly checking the gauges to make sure I was at the right depth, and not running out of air, I was totally hooked. There is simply nothing like floating in the ocean when you are in the "cage" of your SCUBA gear and animal life is watching you. My first open water dives were off Playa Tortuga on the Southwest coast of Costa Rica. From there I went to Cozumel, Maui, and Cabo St. Lucas.
I had accumulated some 25 dives when I decided to take a camera with me. I was doing pretty well with buoyancy control, and my breathing was more relaxed. I was no longer the one to have to surface first due to lack of air, and I felt that I could turn some of my attention to the camera. I have a Canon PowerShot S50, and my daughter, also a diver, has an S30, so I bought the Canon WP-DC300 Waterproof Case, which accommodates both cameras.
So, all decked out in full SCUBA regalia, I wrapped the camera's wrist strap around my wrist and took to the water at Palancar Gardens in Cozumel. The first thing that happened was that I couldn't get down! The camera case, full of air, added unexpected (to me) buoyancy. OK, easy enough, two more pounds on the weight belt, and down I went. Now I'm swimming around, shooting everything that moves and a lot that doesn't. I wore out the battery in 45 minutes! As this was the first time with the camera, I was not too disappointed when none of my shots were any good. There was the problem with shutter lag (I got quite a few shots of fish tails at the edge of the frame), ocean snow (the reflection of the built-in flash on floating particles), and many other weird and wonderful effects. I took it down on a few more dives that trip, and ended up with one or two shots worth keeping.
Back to the drawing board and Google – boy, did I have a lot to learn about underwater photography! Undaunted, and now a little more educated, I took the camera on my next two trips, to Maui and back to Cozumel. By the end of the Cozumel trip I actually had more good shots than bad, and even shot a short movie of our dive master blowing a bubble ring and then swimming through it. This time, the battery held out, but I filled up my memory card!
Time to get more educated. I found a great tutorial on Canon's web site (see tutorial link below) and learned a bunch of new things. The most important of which were the need to add ballast to the camera to offset the buoyancy of the case (duh!), and the proper settings to use at different depths to compensate for refraction. Since I had always left the camera on Auto, I now had to turn to the camera user's manual (yes, I actually kept mine!) to figure out how to do this.
I'm now getting ready for my next trip (to Turks and Caicos this August), and looking forward to ever better shots. I know now to use daylight setting down to about 25-35 feet, and cloudy when going deeper. I have the recommended ballast weights on the case (Canon WW-DC1), I've cleaned and lubricated the O-ring on the case, and I bought a 1GB CF memory card. At the resolution I've been using, this will give me about 700 shots – should be enough. I can always spend my evenings deleting those fish tails…
About the Author: Allan Kirson is an amateur photographer, steadily improving SCUBA diver, and the owner of GreatDigitalCamerasOnline.com
Canon's Tutorial: Digital Camera Underwater Photography Guide |
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