| Moving from a Nikonos V to a housing,
or more particularly, to a single lens reflex camera. Is certainly
going to expand your capabilities insofar as subject matter
is concerned. Aside from the obvious advantages of focusing
and composing through the taking lens, the superiority of
the SLR system is vast. Many, if not most of the small active
critters which might be serene (stupid) enough to accommodate
your placement of a Nikonos framer around them have been eaten
long before you find the,. With an SLR, you can hang back
several inches or more and fill the frame with a subject and
inch or two long. This alone will mean that many more subjects
within your means of photographing them have survived long
enough for you to find the,. Then you should also consider
God’s gift to underwater photographers—the macro
lens. With this lens you can fill your frame with a subject
anywhere from one by one and a half inches to two by three
feet or greater on a single dive without changing lenses.
It’s possible to house just about any SLR camera you
might own. There are, however some significant advantages
which may not be readily obvious in housing some cameras over
others. First, the housing must allow for accessing necessary
camera controls. Cameras which require more than one control
to be manipulated at a time in order to control a single function
may be more difficult to use in a housing. It might be a simple
matter to push a button and turn a command wheel when holding
the camera in your hand, but this may become a clumsy operation
when two hands are needed to simultaneously push, pull, or
turn two controls, while a third hand is needed to hold onto
the housing (and a fourth would be useful to stabilize yourself
on the reef).
A second important consideration in choosing a camera to
house (and in the minds of many experienced photographers,
the single most important) is access to the image in the viewfinder
when the camera is inside the housing. Vision through the
finder is generally adequate when using just about any camera
as it was intended to be used…on land. You can simply
plaster your eyeball against the finder windows and see all
of the image on the viewing screen at a reasonably decent
size, as well as all of the camera information surrounding
the image. As a rule, if you pull your eye back an inch or
two, as you’d be required to do if the camera were on
the other side of a quarter inch of glass or plastic and you
had a face mask on, you’d only see the very center of
the image and no camera information in most camera finders.
The exceptions to this rule are those cameras having large
"Sport" or "Action" finders—cameras
designed with the professional photographer in mind. The exit
pupil (thing you look into) on this type of finder is about
three to five times larger than on the normal consumer camera.
Somewhere between these two extremes are the "high eye
point" finders designed to be used by eyeglass wearers.
"But don’t housing manufacturers provide a magnifier
for the finder so that you can see the image just as well?"
I wish the answer to this, the most asked question by housing
buyers could be, "Why yes, they certainly do!" What
they do, in fact, provide is a reducing lens to shrink the
image so that it can be seen in its entirety from outside
the housing by a diver wearing a mask. The smaller image makes
a manual focusing and composition more difficult, resulting
in less control for the photographer. The better and faster
the autofocus functions in your particular camera, the less
critical are the limitations on your visual acuity imposed
by the reduction in size of the image in the finder when critical
focusing is required.
The third consideration in deciding whether housing your
camera will meet your needs is the electronic flash dedication
factor. The simple, unavoidable fact is that Nikon owns underwater
flash photography. Not only Nikonos flash units, but every
after-market flash unit from virtually every manufacturer
is made to work with the Nikonos camera. The language used
to communicate between the camera and the flash is always
"Nikonese." Nikonese is spoken by all Nikon cameras
(Except the F3 which speaks a funky dialect and requires an
electronic interpreter), made to fully dedicate with any underwater
flash unit. Dedication means that the flash will not only
work TTL, but will signal the camera when it is charged and
ready to fire, will set the camera’s shutter speed to
a speed that will synchronize with the flash, will indicate
in the camera’s viewfinder when the flash has fired
full power, and may tell the camera that since there is a
flash present, it needn’t hold the shutter open until
an acceptable available light exposure is achieved. This can
result in long shutter speeds with resulting blurred available
light images. Ikelite Underwater Systems of Indianapolis,
Indiana, has done a very good job, at times requiring a great
deal of effort and ingenuity, in breaking the codes which
the various camera manufacturers use in camera-to-strobe communication
and then converting these codes to Nikonese. You can, therefore,
order an Ikelite housing for most any SLR camera. Most will
offer dedication; however, some models will be restricted
in exposure selection and may have to be used either in manual
or shutter priority exposure mode.
If you’re ready to move into housed SLR photography,
you are, as you suggest, wise to consider upgrading your terrestrial
camera system. You are about to make a considerable investment,
not only in your housing and housing accessories, but also
in new lenses. The odds are that the lenses which you are
now using on land won’t be the best choice for use underwater.
Most people have a normal lens and a couple of zooms—say
a 28-80 or so and an 80-200. Few casual land photographers
have anything wider than a twenty-eight. The most useful lenses
underwater are macro lenses—in the normal, fifty or
so millimeter range and maybe the 100 or so millimeter range—and
very wide lenses, twenty-four millimeter or wider. The 28-80
lens may be a good underwater lens, but most of the rest of
the lenses in the average photog’s gadget bag are anywhere
from very limiting to useless underwater. Some important considerations:
are you completely satisfied with your present camera system
on land, how important is your underwater Vs your terrestrial
photography, can you accomplish your focusing and composition
requirements through your present finder, and will you be
able to access the controls you need in the housing?
Lastly, but by no means leastly—can you?--would you?--should
you?--spend the bigger bucks for the bigger system? The high
eye point camera systems start at around $1500 for a body
and housing, and you could spend at lest a couple of thousand
dollars more for the higher end housing. A large action finder
camera, such as an F3, with a basic housing starts at about
$2000, and the later, higher technology F4 (with an orchestra-sized
array of bells and whistles) has an entry level pricetag of
several thousand dollars. Nearly all of the deluxe housings
are made for Nikon cameras in what Nikon calls its Advanced
Systems Line. These cameras are the 8008 and the 8008S, the
N90, the F4, and the new N90S. You now have the opportunity
to measure your interest in and commitment to your photography
in terms of dollars.
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