Best Cameras for Underwater

I guess when it comes to underwater photography it should never be a case of what is best, but what is right for you. I started with a Nikonos V, and even though I owned a Subal F90 housing, the Nik V was always my preferred camera. I love both the compactness and the quality of image. I used it with the classic 15mm lens and it was perfect for film work. For a deep diver, such as myself, it did present a problem beyond certain depths. However I was able to take it well beyond the 50m that it is rated do, happily taking shots at 80m+. It stopped working at around 100m! That’s when I got the Subal out. It had been tested to 150m so I knew that it was good for that.

After a lot of anguish, I went digital around five years ago. And in doing so I invested in Seacam, which in my view is easily the best housing ever made. They are simply beautiful. Even though they are only tested to 80m, I knew that something as well made as the seacam could easily go deeper. And it did. The deepest I took it was 135m on a wreck in Scotland. It worked well. The only problem was the switches on the strobe. For that I use the Subtonic. I had borrowed one a year or two before I bought it. Having used the Sea and Sea strobes for a few years, I could see that the Subtronic was vastly superior. There’s nothing basically wrong with the Sea and Sea strobes, however I managed to implode one once at 120m. I thought that my HP hose had gone on the rebreather, but the lack of bubbles suggested the problem was elsewhere. It was. The implosion had forced the front of the strobe out through the back. Suffice to say that was the end of that!

The trick with taking any camera deep is simply this: choose a setting on the surface or in shallow water, and when you’re deep just press the shutter. Do not change any of the settings. As soon as you start moving knobs etc at depth you risk the o-rings trapping and flooding. Apart from anything else, there isn’t the time, or the inclination to start messing with settings. Experience will tell you the best settings to choose – for me it was 400-1600 ISO and f5.6. After that, it was really a case of taking the photos and hoping for the best!