shelbyrose

I have a quadripod set-up (made last year using some of your guidance actually!), so this is all really helpful. When you say you are shooting handheld with the front legs spread out, do you mean that the front legs are in position so that you could lower your rig into the sand if needed (while the back two are folded up)? Totally! This is mainly what I've relied upon so far in my filmmaking. 🙂 I love my LX10 but really do wish it could do 4K/60p as that would give so much more flexibility in post for both cropping and stabilisation.... Do you just carry whichever lens you aren't using in a pocket? Love love your mimic octopus video by the way. What amazing creatures. I'm jealous you're spending time in Amed! That was where I first learned to dive, and I absolutely loved it there. It was also where I had my all time favourite creature sighting -- a pegasus seamoth -- which I hope I'll get the chance to see again someday. Thanks, yet again 🙂

Many thanks for all of the photos and detailed information @bghazzal! You've given me a lot of things to try out in the pool next week...! I need to dig into the links you and @Davide DB both sent too, so might come back with some more questions once I've had the chance to digest all this and do some testing. Do you sometimes shoot both WA and macro on the same dive, and if so, are you able to adjust your rig buoyancy on the fly somehow? And I assume the answer is yes, but do you always shoot macro using the quadripod?

Thanks so much for all of these thoughts, @Davide DB @bghazzal @Chris Ross! Such a helpful bunch. ☺️ I'll play around with moving one of the float arms underneath the housing (though I take your point @Davide DB about not going too far the other direction lol). That float base thing looks brilliant too... @bghazzal do you happen to have a photo of your macro set-up? I'm definitely looking at playing around more with macro too, so I'm curious to learn what you've discovered on this front too! For your moveable float, is it the kind of thing you adjust prior to a dive or are you able to adjust it during a dive? And that video you shared with the stabiliser float is great and would be super helpful for changing camera angles. I'll play around with that too! I'm still keen to figure out how I can get a greater variety of camera movements out of this set-up too so will play around more with float configurations and see if that might do the trick. My film practice generally is more experimental, and what I'd ideally love to achieve is a more gestural mode of underwater filmmaking. Take for example, the kinds of camera movements used by Stan Brakhage here: The nice thing with more experimental filmmaking is that I can live with some shake and less than perfect focus, etc. 😂 I just have struggled to get the camera really to change angle and rotate without putting a ton of force into it, but perhaps distributing the floats more closer to the centre of mass as you all suggest will help...! Many thanks again!!

Hi all! Some of you gave me some great advice last summer regarding underwater video, and I'm back hoping to pick your brains a bit more as I prepare to do some filming in the Red Sea next month. 😁 I'm shooting on an LX10 in a nauticam housing, and when shooting wide angle, I'm using an Inon UWL-09F wide angle wet lens. I've been able to dial in a good float set-up in terms of the amount of flotation I need to achieve neutral buoyancy for the rig (primarily using a float collar, one large float arm horizontal above the housing with additional floats zip-tied to it or float arms with lights (if I'm using them). But one thing I'm not super happy about is that this configuration is SO stable that it can be really difficult to move the camera in certain ways without having to really put some force into it that results in camera shake (and then the camera wants to immediately bounce back into position). So for example, if I wanted to tilt, or rotate the camera left or right, it fights me. (Hopefully I am explaining this clearly enough!!) Is there a way to position floats to give you more flexibility beyond always having the lens always pointing straight forward? Or any other tricks? Many thanks!!

Hi everyone! I'm a film PhD student based in London and have been getting into underwater video. I was previously a wet pixel member and got some amazing advice from folks, so I'm excited to be joining this new forum. 🙂