feeding time at the zoo
Last year Meghan and I took off for a couple of weeks to Belize. It was an awesome trip.
On one of our days on Caye Caulker we went snorkeling and I took the opportunity to test out my underwater housing that I bought for my large point-and-shoot Canon G7. I purchased the underwater housing from B&H as a bit of a test – underwater photography was something that I had been interested in for a while – and after the last couple of trips to Thailand where the snorkeling was amazing, I was really intrigued.
The set up worked pretty well. I opted for a cheaper housing, which is basically just a really robust ziplock with a rigid front for the lens. As such the controls were pretty hard to use once underwater – so set it before the camera goes in the bag.
This is one of my favorite photos from the day. After shooting a few fish and coral bits, I saw this image of folks from another snorkeling outfit listening to instructions from their dive master. Meghan calls this the Jaws photo.
Shooting underwater required a bit of setup but once done, the pictures turned out pretty well (I think.. judge for yourself). I had to set the white balance – and the ‘underwater’ setting on the G7 worked pretty well. I also set the ISO for a slightly darker image (as the light falls off pretty quickly underwater and the built-in flash is useless with the underwater housing). I then opened up the apeture as wide as it would go – meaning I had to give the camera time to focus before firing to avoid the blurs. Zooming wasn’t possible with the housing so I just shot everything wide and cropped when I got back. This also helped as framing the subjects was often a challenge.
After this experience I will definitely continue to bring the housing on future trips – and if I were to get serious about snorkeling (is there such a thing?) SCUBA, I would like to invest in a proper housing for the SLR. But until then, I like the setup that I’ve got.
As an aside, I also used the housing for our trip to the ATM cave inland in Belize which was pretty cool as I was the only one who was able to take photos of the hike in because everyone else had their cameras packed away in the waterproof bag.
Finally, choosing only 1 photo each week can been a challenge – for various reasons. This week’s challenge was choosing 1 image from the Belize trip. This was my runner-up. It was taken in preparation for the trip to Africa later in the year (shooting animals). It was also taken with the Canon G7 – a camera I’ve since replaced with an updated G10 model because my G7 got damaged. It’s on my list of posts (for knuetter.com) to write about my impressions with the G-series cameras from Canon. The short: It’s a camera I recommend highly.
