MVF Trekker

Those look great. Did you use any additional lighting?

flightmedic

I would also suggest you look at www.scubaboard.com. They have a photo section with tons and tons of great info.

If you don't get an external light (strobe) your pictures below about 30 feet will be very blue. You need some type of photo editing software to make them presentable, even if you use the built in flash on a camera.

vmsea

+1^

Which is why you want to shoot in RAW, and adjust the white balance afterwards.

ryandelmundo

I'm a Divemaster and I thought I'd chime in on Cameras.

Most photos people take are terrible. Light is very challenging underwater, and makes for bad photos. You either need a huge flash or to get very close.

Cameras turn decent divers into terrible divers. They spend the entire dive looking at a 3" screen instead of enjoying the dive. They also float all over the place, endangering themselves.

I highly recommend giving the camera to your divemaster and have him/her take pictures of you and your party underwater - those are always great.

vmsea

I presume you are referring to inexperienced divers, with inexperience when it comes to photography.

I hand my camera to someone else once in a while.. but only to take a photo of me.. then i want it back.

willyroo

Both.

No editing on-camera, and the only files are .mp4 and .jpg - no RAW AFAIK. This is a "point and shoot" infinite focus camera that is great to "just use".

There are some much better cameras recommended in this thread, however the GoPro is light, easy to use, and allows you to enjoy your diving and snorkelling...and not have to concentrate on the equipment.

ryandelmundo

Even experienced divers are dumb with the camera. My friend just came back from Indonesia and was doing this epic dive with Hammerheads or some other sharks. Tons of them One of the divers who was quite experienced was taking all sorts of photos and meanwhile was sinking downwards. There wasn't any frame of reference because the sharks were everywhere, and when very deep you don't really feel the extra depth on your ears. One of the divemasters went down to 55m to pull him up, which is extremely dangerous. I don't know that I would have gone that deep.

I've seen this too many times as people drift up towards a bunch of boats on the surface or down to the bottom. Even worse, I've seen instructors let their open water students carry a camera.

So if you get a camera, please please be careful! Diving is plenty safe but you have to keep your wits about you.

serioustraveler

I got the Go Pro HD HD HERO2: Motorsports Edition and am getting my certification in Jamaica.

If I buy the Dive housing does it come with a head strap? Is it possible to turn it off and on while underwater? I would probably just have it in video mode and turn it on if I see anything interesting.

Are the red lenses easy to install and how bad is it if I don't use them?

MVF Trekker

I'm really new at this and it might sound dumb but what does it mean "to shoot in raw?"

zkzkz

The headstrap comes with the Outdoor Edition package or I think you can buy it separately. I don't think it comes in the grab-bag of mounts but I could be wrong.

Fwiw I found the headstrap kind of annoying to use with a facemask and it made me worry it would be hard to clear my mask if I needed to. YMMV. I'm thinking of epoxying one of the small mount things to the top of the facemask directly. There are some videos of people doing this using a bolt but my mask doesn't have anywhere I could bolt onto easily.

Changing modes reliably requires being able to look at the screen. But just starting and stopping the video if you're in video mode or taking photographs if you're in photo mode can be done without looking at it. There are distinctive beep patterns specifically so you can use it without looking at it.

That said it's a perfectly viable option, and perhaps safer, to just start videoing at the surface and stop when you're done. A 32MB card can store 4h of video and one battery lasts > 2h so you could probably get two dives on a single battery or you could change batteries between dives.

There's even a mode you can turn on that makes it start as soon as you turn it on. That way you can leave it off until you're ready and press a single button to start and never touch it again until the surface.

I don't think the gopro dive housing takes filters. IIRC Eyeofmine mod takes filters but none of the others do. I don't imagine it would be terribly hard to add but I wouldn't know.

sbm12

Some of the stills had an external strobe. Most didn't. All shot in straight JPEG and minimal editing if at all.

fiveninerzero

Once you get past a certain amount of dives, your buoyancy becomes second nature-ish, and you will find that it really isn't too difficult to shoot video or take pictures underwater while maintaining directional control. The only ones that I see drifting are either novices, or are trying way too hard to compose a shot.

I actually prefer my GoPro HD without the LCD backpack because it forces me to just lay back and enjoy my dive, as opposed to trying to be a master photographer, constantly making a conscious effort to take pictures. I just carry my GoPro in hand (I have a simple retainer strap attached to my BCD just in case, but have rolled naked before and also have the $20 floaty red backdoor foam from the manufacturer attached to the backdoor) and point it in the general direction that I would like to shoot and sort it out later. I usually return to the boat pleasantly surprised (I carry my iPad and the Apple SD Card adapter to import and review my work.)

I typically roll around with it in continuous shot mode, that way I don't have to fiddle around with the shutter as I swim. If I see something really interesting, I have remembered all the button sequences, and can quickly switch to 720p 60 fps mode (all buttons are pressable underwater) without looking. Sometimes you can even hear the beep for confirmation, but sometimes I do tilt the front towards my face to double check that the red LED is blinking. I also tend to program it for instant on recording to save time as well. I typically get around a day's worth of diving (3-5 dives) off a charge, depending on how many times I use video recording. Picture-only mode lasts for what seems forever.

I have 2 spare batteries, but the only time that I needed those was on the liveaboard boat off the coast of Thailand. Also, 32 GB on a GoPro HD will outlast your battery.

This will fit inside any housing: (I have the Eye Of Mine) http://www.makospearguns.com/product-p/mccf.htm You have to stick it in the lens portion of the housing, and you may have to slightly trim it to fit, but a filter like this is a necessity from around 5 feet to 80 feet depth. They are cheap enough to buy several and play with until you get it right.

vmsea

Ok that's dumb. I pay extra attention to depth and my surroundings when I have a camera knowing that I will be distracted.. And I tend to turn off the camera for a few minutes at a time so i can soak in the dive..
Instructors are crazy if they let a student carry a camera.. i guess you have irresponsible people everywhere.

RAW is an image format where no compression/editing is done in camera.. think of it as the name sounds.. you get the 'Raw Data'. When you click, you see an image on the back screen.. that image is processed by your camera. so the computer inside the camera does what IT thinks are adjustments needed. The problem with it (and jpeg) is that the computer will adjust then compress it.. so if you want to edit it after, you lose quality.

Read up a bit on it.. RAW isn't for everyone. if you want some snaps of friends at a bday party.. jpeg works great..
if you want to edit photos for wall papers.. you probably want more control of RAW.

zkzkz

That's accurate but I think missing the key property that makes it relevant for diving.

The key point is that jpeg has less dynamic range than the camera sensor can actually pick up. That is, the difference between black and white involves fewer steps than the camera can distinguish. So one of the steps the camera has to do to do the conversion is decide what the darkest and lightest range of each colour channel it needs is. Anything outside that range is just fully saturated or desaturated.

For diving that means white balancing based on the RAW file might recover more detail from the red channel before the camera decides it's all too dark and needs to be quantized to just a few levels or worse might be all 0.

The other technique for dealing with this is to use a red filter. That darkens the blue and green channels so you can use a longer exposure or higher ASA to get more red detail along with the others.