Hi folks, there are some subjects that come up regularly when discussing underwater photography on Facebook and during our workshops how to look after your equipment is probably one of the areas that gets the most questions. Even a relatively low cost underwater photography setup won’t be peanuts, so you want to make it last well and not decide to fail in the middle of an amazing diving trip.
With that in mind I’ve put together a few tips to help. This is by no means a complete list, just a selection of things that have come up in conversation with customers, workshop students or people on our Facebook group. But hopefully at least some will be new information for you and will prevent your camera, housing or strobe coming to a premature end.
Always take a new housing on a test dive before you use it with a camera inside.
With good quality brands of underwater housing it’s extremely rare for there to be a fault from the manufacturing that results in a leak. But if that happens and your camera is damaged the manufacturer and the dealer who you bought it from won’t pay you back for the repair or replacement of the camera. Only fixing or replacing the faulty housing will be covered by warranty. So always give a new housing a test run empty no matter how confident you are with brand. Things do occasionally slip through quality control (more so with cheap brands) and there’s also the possibility that a housing has been damaged some how on its journey from the factory to you.
If you buy a used underwater camera housing it’s wise to still give it a test dive without a camera in it.
Beware of sand, especially if you have a plastic housing.
Sand getting into the controls of any underwater camera housing isn’t great. It can work its way down to the o ring that keeps the button or dial sealed and cause it to leak. A leak like that can often be fixed by having the control in question taken apart and cleaned. On some housing brands you can do that yourself and replacement o rings and in some cases entire buttons can be bought. Or you can send the housing off to be professionally serviced. In the case of plastic housings however, sand in the controls can be fatal. The housing itself around the controls is soft enough that when sand gets inside a button the action of using the controls repeatedly can wear the plastic away enough that the o ring can no longer make a seal. The upshot of that is usually the housing is no longer usable and you have to replace it. I’ve come across this a couple of times with underwater photographers using their plastic housings a lot, while shore diving on sites with sandy beaches.
Be diligent in rinsing your housing after every use, giving it quite vigorous swishes in freshwater to help wash sand away not just leaving it to soak. Check the controls for sand, clear plastic around controls on housings helps with that and often you can feel a change in the buttons or dials not moving as smoothly. If you find sand in your controls stop using it immediately and get the housing serviced to remove the sand if you can’t rinse it out yourself. If you are buying a housing that’s going to get a lot of use in sandy conditions think about whether it’s worth going with an aluminium housing which will be more durable.
Aluminium housings like this Nauticam that Anne is using have very long lifespans if looked after. If you have one and like the camera that fits it, I recommend you pick up an extra camera or two on the used market. It’s usually the camera that will wear out before the housing.
Strobes don’t thrive on neglect.
If you use strobes (waterproof flash units) for your underwater photography and you don’t dive regularly you should take them out and test them every month. This is actually recommended in the small print of a lot of strobe manuals but it’s way at the back in the bit that you never reached because you lost interest after the bit about how to set it to manual and went off diving instead. From what I can gather it has something to do with the capacitors failing if they aren’t regularly used. But don’t quote me on that, I just use the things I don’t build them. You don’t need to take them for a dive, a quick test shot at home is enough, but don’t fire them repeatedly in air as that can damage strobes due to overheating.
Waterproof cameras are supposed to be serviced.
This is another one of those things hidden away in the instructions that a lot of people have never found. Manufacturers of waterproof cameras such as the Olympus (now OM Systems) TG’s recommend you get your camera serviced regularly to make sure the seals inside it don’t fail. In the case of the TG’s this should be every year. I don’t recommend you use a waterproof camera underwater without a housing, but if you do and it floods don’t expect repair and replacement if it’s over a year old and you haven’t had it serviced even if you have an extended warranty.
There’s an oft used acronym when people ask questions about equipment on Facebook, RTFM. Read The F****** Manual. But lets be honest camera manuals are usually quite weighty and filled with info about features you might never use. So don’t feel bad if some of the important things slip by. Distilling these tomes down to the useful information and passing it on is one of the things that keeps me busy.
Don’t leave your camera equipment in a rinse tank.
The rinse tank is the graveyard of cameras. While it’s important to rinse salt water, sand etc from your equipment leaving your camera setup unattended in a dive boat’s rinse tank isn’t a good idea. In fact the only time Anne and I have lost a camera to flooding was due to it being placed in a small rinse bucket on a dive boat into which the deckhand then dropped a large video camera setup. The victim in this case of camera manslaughter was a Fujifilm compact in a plastic housing. The impact of the big metal video camera housing broke the locking mechanism on the housing door and when we fished it out the housing was full of water and the camera pretty much dead. We learnt our lesson. If a crew member takes a camera off one of us when getting out of the water we go straight to the tank and retrieve it or ask them not to put it in there at all and rinse it ourselves when we are out.
Not leaving your camera gear in the rinse tank doesn’t just keep it safe from damage, it leaves space for other people to rinse their gear when they get out. On a photography workshop there may be quite a lot of cameras needing rinsing after each dive, don’t hog the rinsing facilities.
As well as housings and cameras being killed in rinse tanks, ports and wet lenses are vulnerable to scratches from things being dropped on them. When we run workshops in resorts I’m careful to police the rinse tanks and do my best to make sure that camera only rinse tanks are kept as such. I’ve upset a few non-photographers over the years who struggled to grasp why I didn’t want them balancing regulator first stages precariously on the edge of the camera tank above someone’s camera rig. You see that sort of problem less in places like Lembeh where the majority of guests tend to be photographers than in some of the more general diving hotspots.
PartinG Shots
Hopefully those tips will be helpful to you. I plan on putting another blog out next week with some more advice about equipment care.
In the meantime feel free to join our Facebook Q & A group where you can ask questions and join in discussions (please read the rules before doing anything on there).
If you’d like to join us for one of our workshops we run in the UK or overseas you’ll find dates and information about them on the Events page. Drop us an email at info@alphamarinephoto.com to book spaces or ask questions.
We are also an underwater photography equipment dealer selling a wide range of brands including housings by Nauticam and Fantasea. Use the same email address to get in touch about equipment ordering.
And if you would like to support me in writing blogs, running the Facebook group etc and don’t think you’ll buy equipment or do a workshop, you can ‘buy me a coffee’.
Thanks for reading.
Phil