Current Underwater Photography Equipment

A friend of mine said to me a few years ago that he was considering giving up photography and developing a heroin habit instead because he needed to save some money....

Photography can indeed be an expensive hobby and underwater photography particularly so, because you not only have to buy all the camera gear, you need to house it to take it underwater.

Then you need to travel to some exotic location to use it!

I use Nikon DSLR cameras underwater and for a lot of my land photography and the saving grace is that most of the equipment is black in color, so all that camera "stuff" I have bought kind of looks all the same to my wife who has no interest at all in how the image was taken....

Underwater Photography Equipment - Camera

My current main DSLR is the Nikon D300 which I bought soon after it was first released for use on land as I was about to start a work assignment in China (www.nomadicpixel.com) and wanted the superior low noise capability that it offered. Previously I had been using a D200 both above & below water and had very little intention of using the D300 underwater as I felt that the advantages it did offer over the D200 could never justify the very considerable cost of changing housings.

Then I heard about the conversion kits that WetPixel member Sam Chae had developed to mount the D300 into a number of different D200 housings, including the Subal D20 which I already owned.... A kit at US$200 compared to a new housing at around US$4000 suddenly put a whole new perspective on the situation!

Sam seems to live an itinerant life and spends his time in either the USA, Korea or the Philippines and was very hard to track down at first because of his travel and the email tsunami that his kits had generated! But track him down I did and just days before I was leaving for a trip to Tawali in PNG in December 2008, the kit arrived at my home in Sydney and three hours later I had the D300 working in the Subal D200 housing.

I did the Tawali trip & a subsequent trip to Tufi in February of this year and the images taken with the D300 in the D20 housing can be seen by clicking on the links or on the Image Galleries tab at the top of the page.

Full details of the D300 conversion can be found on this link.

Underwater Photography Equipment - Housing

My first aluminum housing was the Subal one for the Nikon F801 which I bought from Ocean Optics in London back in 1995. I had previously tried a Canon F1 in an Ikelite housing but had been underwhelmed, mainly because of the darkness of the viewfinder and went back to using Nikonos cameras.

The F801 and it's super bright viewfinder changed all that and I ended up selling all my Nikonos stuff and concentrating on using an SLR underwater.

I have a very high regard for the quality of Subal housings and upgraded to a F100 when I managed to buy a second-hand Subal housing for one. When I went "digital" with the Nikon D100 camera I stayed with Subal as I already had most of the ports & accessories I needed, as was the case when I upgraded again a few years to the Nikon D200 - my fourth Subal housing.

I buy my Subal stuff from Sea Optics in Adelaide, who are the Australian agent and who I have found to be very good with excellent service - particularly if it's urgent because you are about to leave on a trip somewhere!

Underwater Photography Equipment - Lenses

Lenses are positively addictive....no sooner do you think you have all that you could ever possibly need, when a new one is released that you just have to have! But here is what I am currently using:

Nikon 10.5mm: This is just a fantastic lens that is both very fast and very sharp when used behind the Subal FE2 dome port. It focuses really close and produces wonderful images when driven hard.

Tokina 10-17mm: This lens has probably had more internet traffic than any other lens used underwater and I bought mine in Japan soon after they were first released & very hard to find. Lots of underwater photographers rave about this lens and I agree that it offers tremendous flexibility underwater with it's zoom range, but it's not perfect.

I found that it's actually quite soft when used at anything wider that f8 and so nearly always shoot it at least at f11 and up the ISO if the available light is not so good.

Basically if I have dived the site before or know there will be a chance to photograph something big, I go for the Nikon 10.5mm, but if I am not sure and it looks like a good site for underwater wide angle photography, I go for the Tokina.

Sigma 17-70mm: This is my "not sure of the dive site" lens - the one I use when nobody can tell you very clearly what the next site has to offer photographically. The Sigma has a very nice range, focuses close and is both fast & sharp.

I bought the very expensive Nikon 17-55mm lens to fill this gap, but while it's a fantastic lens above water it's limited close focus capability and sheer size make the Sigma a better choice underwater at about one third of the Nikon's price.

Nikon 70-180mm: This lens is, in my opinion, one of Nikon's best products for underwater photographers, but for some reason it is not particularly popular apart from it's hard core fans.

I first saw it being used during a trip to PNG in 2003 by Roger Steene, the godfather of Australian underwater photography, who was on the boat with us in Milne Bay. Roger swore by the lens and it's sharpness & flexibility, so I started to look for one and the special Subal port required to use it. I eventually found a new lens in Hong Kong and the port & lens gears in Singapore.

I use the Nikon 70-180 macro zoom for probably 80% of my macro photography and have found it to be excellent overall - it has allowed me to capture images that would not have been possible with other lenses. I am in the process of writing a more comprehensive review of the lens for underwater use, and will post it here when I do, but in the meantime check out my pygmy seahorse gallery and Thom Hogan's review

Nikon 28-70mm: I heard about this lens from Alex Mustard who advised me that it is an excellent general purpose lens for fish and macro/muck photography. Alex was right, the lens is very good and is both fast & sharp, although I have yet to produce any of the stunning images with it that he has....

It's not a true macro lens, but has pretty good close focus capability and I use it for the other 20% of my macro photography.

Underwater Photography Equipment - Strobes

For many years I was using the Ikelite Substrobe 225's but their sheer size & weight (I had 3 of the monsters) was threatening to give me a hernia.... So I sold them and bought two second-hand Sea & Sea 200's, which were smaller and lighter than the Ikelites, but still big!

From there I went for the the Ikelite DS200's complete with the manual controllers, which I was very happy with in the water but was eventually forced to replace because of the extreme difficulties every traveling underwater photographer faces with baggage these days as the airlines hone their gouging skills on us with excess baggage charges!

So after agonizing about whether they would actually be powerful enough, I bought my first Inon Z240 and tested it against my Ikelite 200's and a Sea & Sea YS90. What I did was use a flash meter to measure the output of each strobe at set distances and then again with each strobe 12" to the right and to the left, so I could judge how much light fall off there was.

The results of the comparison of the Ikelite DS200, Sea & Sea YS90 and Inon Z240 strobes can be seen on this table. The results surprised me an convinced me to change over completely to the Inon strobes and I now own three of them!

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