Underwater Photography Tips

• My digital camera's waterproof housing - Canon IXUS v3
• My results - Still photos
• My results - Videos
• Where to Learn More
• Further Discussions

My digital camera's waterproof housing - Canon IXUS v3

My results - Still photos

My results - Videos

Underwater Photography Tips

• Sunlight - You can't really have too much sunlight. This is particularly true for compact digital camera such as mine because the built-in flash is so weak.
• Diver buoyancy - I have found keeping a camera steady underwater to be quite a challenge. This is particularly true if your are snorkeling and you do not have a 100% neutral buoyancy. If you are positively buoyant you will start drifting upward as you pause to take a photo which can be quite frustrating. There is nothing worse than missing that shot of the day because you drifted back to the surface! Using a weight belt can assist in maintaining a more neutral buoyancy but of course the use of weight belts is something for experienced snorkelers. When I use a weight belt I like to always be slightly positively buoyant (for my own peace of mind) and so upward drifting continues to be a problem for me. I can however expel some air from my lungs and that will temporarily lower my buoyancy. Though it can be quite disconcerting if you end up sinking to the ocean floor because you exhaled too much! I would be interested to hear the views of more experienced divers on the wisdom of achieving neutral buoyancy in this manner. I am quite the novice really when it comes to diving technique.
• Camera buoyancy - Not all cameras are neutrally buoyant. However it is possible to achieve this by adding weight to your camera housing if required.
• Fogging of waterproof case - When I first took my digital camera underwater I found that the front lens fogged up so it was not really possible to take any photos! This was quite a disappointment. However it is a problem that was easily overcome. I used some silica gel (which commonly arrives in shoe boxes) and placed a packet of this inside the waterproof case. The silica gel acts as a desiccant which means it draws moisture out of the air. This prevented the fogging up of the glass.
• Auto-Focus - Underwater Problems - I found auto-focus underwater quite frustrating. Quite often I would take perhaps 10 photos of the same fish and all of them would be blurry. I found that the auto-focus lock also was difficult to set underwater. It was times like this when I wished I had an SLR camera.
• Flash Strength - The biggest flaw in my camera setup is the flash. It is just too weak to light up anything more than a few inches from the lens.
• Underwater movie beats still photos - With my digital camera I find that the quality my short movies is quite good and fairly consistent. On the other hand, I find a lot of my photographs end up being blurry. I believe this blurriness is caused by a combination of factors (discussed above) including underwater auto-focus problems, insufficient light (and hence a shutter speed that is too slow) and camera shake.

Where to Learn More