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U/W PHOTOGRAPHY FOR THE TRAVELLING DIVER
By Tony Baskeyfield |
6 Choosing a Digital Camera
There are plenty of digital cameras on the market that will fit into a specialist housing to choose from. What Camera? and all of the dive mag's are constantly reporting on what's available and will give good guidance.
When choosing, ask yourself a few questions so that your choice is based on your needs rather than "it's a nice looking camera"
- how many megapixels do you want?
- What deals are available from suppliers?
- How much are the add-on accessories?
- what is the maximum depth rating?
- how much you will realistically use the camera.
- Can the camera be taken out of the housing and be used for land photography?
- Do you weant to dive? or take pics?
If you want to dive get a small set-up. If you want to take pics buy a camera that will take a flash and can be added to. Don't even think that built in flash will work underwater, they are for use above water and will cause backscatter and overexposure.
Clear housing are good to see through at all the cameras functions and to check for leaks
Here are the thoughts of one of the BSAC Travel Club contributors who has recently purchased digital equipment:
Background
He had been using a Motormarine MX-10 camera with YS-40A for a few years. It had given him adequate performance, especially when he had persevered to get it right, though he had a few problems with film-spooling etc. Macro and night-time shots had been disappointing though. Nevertheless, he had managed to put together several albums of shots taken on dive holidays and several of his photos were acceptable for publication on BSAC website. However, only about one in five to ten photos per film came out OK. Having seen and discussed with a few friends their experiences of digital cameras, he was interested to make a change.
Reasons for change
The main reasons he wanted to change from his existing system to digital were:
- Digital cameras are usually more compact
- They can be used for land use as well as underwater
- Digital images are much easier to edit and even manipulate - he could easily cut out unwanted photo parts
- Images could be near instantly downloaded onto his laptop
- Less wastage - poor images can be instantly deleted within seconds of you taking them
- Much less hassle - no more buying films, developing, ordering prints, checking images, re-ordering, scanning etc - from now on everything would be so much easier
- Perceived performance of digital cameras, especially in shallow water
Criteria for Choice
The main criteria that were important in making a choice of camera and system were:
- Ease of use
- Sufficient number of megapixels to produce a decent photo for use either on websites or to print out an A4 size image for framing (but didn't want professional images for magazine publication etc)
- Budget, including receipt of funds from disposal of existing camera
- Usable for his style of diving. Photos mainly taken in top 10+ metres, but camera would need to be watertight during dives of 35-40 metre range
- Performance of system was satisfactory with add-on lenses, battery life, memory, lighting/strobe etc
How choice was made
In making his choice, he carried out the following steps:
- Discussed initial ideas with those who already had digital cameras
- Read articles in diving press on digital cameras
- Spoke with some of the camera suppliers at NEC Dive Show asking for their tips
- Searched the web for articles on choosing digital cameras
- Bought a couple of "What Camera?" magazines and studied reviews and latest products
- Devised a short-list of possible cameras first, then looked for underwater housings, strobes etc
- Combed websites of the leading UK underwater camera retailers
- Chose alternative solutions and telephoned two main suppliers to discuss choice
- Placed order by e-mail, telephoning the next day to check particulars
He bought -
- Sony P9 Cybershot with 4.0 megapixels
- Sony MPK-P9 Marinepack housing rated to 40 metres
- Epoque ES-150 DS strobe
- Various additional wide-angle lens, batteries and memory
The order was placed with Cameras Underwater by e-mail on 22 December and confirmed by phone late on 23 December, but was delivered 200 miles away early on Christmas Eve, just in time for Christmas and our intrepid photographer's 50th birthday! Impressive.
Results
Within a few weeks of his purchase, he was lucky enough to test out his new equipment on a trip to the Maldives. The results he got were as follows:
- His empty housing flooded on its first dive, soaking the pair of socks it contained to test it out. It was not clear why this happened, but was probably due to hurried closure of seals late at night or dislodging the O-ring by jumping into the water, camera in hand. Three further dives were made before the owner "trusted" the housing with the camera inside. He has not subsequently flooded the camera!
- Nearly 400 photos were taken and approaching half these were of acceptable quality, although some were also immediately deleted underwater
- It was possible to use the camera extensively in shallower water without the strobe
- The built-in zoom was very helpful to take shots of marine creatures in mid-water
- He founded it easier than expected to download shots onto his laptop
- It was easy to delete and crop unwanted shots
- 10 copies of the photos were made to send to those on the trip by downloading them onto CDs. That took about 10 minutes and cost £10 in total - easy and cheap
Digital draw backs
- Digital zooms on compact cameras only crop the image and enlarge centre portion, with a consequential loss of image quality. The best zoom is an optical zoom, which is around 3x and is equivalent to 105mm on a 35mm camera.
- On a 35mm camera the sensor is smaller than a 35mm frame. So all lenses have their effective focal lengths multiplied by 1.5. This is good news for telephoto lens's making a 100mm lens equivalent to 150mm but bad news for wide angle making a 20mm lens equivalent to 30mm. Nikon have brought out a 10.5mm digital lens to cover this problem making it equivalent to 16mm.
- A digital camera kit will also require a lot of new accessories. Spare memory cards, batteries and chargers and a Laptop are now required if you want to view your images.
Digital benefits
- Instant results. Allowing you to make camera adjustments as you shoot.
- No costly processing bills.
- Digital images do not degrade with time.
- You can print you images on your home printer.
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