Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Beginner's Questions => Topic started by: Lisa Nikodym on May 27, 2008, 12:20:51 pm
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Has anyone here used waterproof digicam housings? (Intended for water sports, diving, etc.) I'm thinking about getting one for my Fujifilm F30 for sea kayaking & snorkeling, but would like some opinions on whether they work well. Are they really watertight enough? Is useability significantly affected? Is there is any significant reduction in image quality because you're shooting through an additional layer of plastic?
Lisa
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Good housings are water tight enough, but you will find, even for digital SLRs, that a good housing is as much money as the whole camera by itself.
A good place to start is here
http://wetpixel.com/ (http://wetpixel.com/)
good luck
joe
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Good housings are water tight enough, but you will find, even for digital SLRs, that a good housing is as much money as the whole camera by itself.
In my case, Fujifilm itself makes a housing for their F30, and it's only about $135. It's probably considerably more low-end than the serious DSLR housings on the web site you suggest, but then it's for a digicam rather than a serious camera. I just don't know how much of a hit the image quality will take.
I'll take a more thorough look at the web site when I get a chance. Thanks.
Lisa
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Another option might be that there are a couple of digicams out there that will go underwater w/o a housing. The Olympus Stylus 1030 SW is a 10MP camera that will go to 33 ft. It's about $400, though so more expensive than your housing, and it uses an xD card.
Mike.
http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/...sp?product=1363 (http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1363)
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Does anyone have experience with the Canon G9 housing??
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Does anyone have experience with the Canon G9 housing??
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I recently bought one and used it for snorkeling and beach shots in the keys. It is rated to 130 feet I think, but I never got to test it at any depths since I don't dive. But for my purposes it worked perfectly. I would however invest in some additional flash units if I was going to do a lot of underwater shooting. The built in flash did not seem to work very well underwater.
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The built in flash did not seem to work very well underwater.
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no surprise there. there's always a lot of stuff in the water, tiny impurities that will reflect any flash that's mounted on the camera back into the lens. either turn off the built-in flash or use external flash units that are mounted off the lens' axis.
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as mentioned before, http://wetpixel.com/ (http://wetpixel.com/) has a wealth of information.
i use an aquapac case on my g9 which is a pretty cheap, not perfect solution but works for me. check
here (http://www.songofthepaddle.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=10164) for my review of this thing.
i use it to protect the camera while canoeing so can't comment on how it works for real under water photography.
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Does anyone have experience with the Canon G9 housing??
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I just bought one (the WP-DC21) and will be trying it out in Bali from middle of next week. I´ll let you know more when I come back!
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check out the digicam forum on wetpixel.com
in general digicams underwater have the same advantages and disadvantages underwater as on land. can get good results in good light at shallower depths. going deep, RAW is very useful for color correction but the high ISO noise still makes available light shots marginal. with an external flash, and LCD you can get very good macro shots - likewise for smaller fish so long autofocus is reasonably fast and shutter lag is minimal (which wasn't the case with the digicams i used before buying a housing)
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The Canon G9 underwater housing works very well for what's intended, keeping the camera dry and having access to all the controls (except for the rotating scroll wheel, useful for compensation).
The manual for the WP-DC21 points out how to work around this: with the right configuration you can use the "direct print" button and the left/right controls to emulate the wheel.
I like mine. Makes the camera quite bulky, but it works well!