Wildlife Photographer camera choices

Re. dust issue.

This more of a problem when swapping lenses IMHO. One might be able to go into a tent or other protected place to get way from blowing dust to change film or cards, but if one needs to change to a different focal length etc. during a shoot.....

With film, one tends to use multiple bodies to avoid having to re-load 'in the environment'. This includes pouring rain (common in coastal AK). I recall the closest I have been to bears (late 80’s - Kodiak Is.) - a sow with 3 cubs and each had a salmon in its mouth - only about 20 feet away! It was dark and pouring down rain - I was using a Nikonos 3 with 80mm lens, 400 asa film. When I ran out of film after the second shot I was unwilling to open it up to re-load! I was standing next to a canoe (it grounded as it was very shallow) and it was extremely wet - a formula for disaster to have to re-load. The pix were lousy due to the fast film and grey conditions too. A P&S digi might be good for such a situation (also potential for beefing up colors) so long as one had a good supply of batteries as this was at one of the powerless locations I referred to above.

Tom

Next year will be the 25th anniversary of Within the Rainbow Sea.  The color separation process that existed at the time to produce this book can be performed much more easily today and yet I am stilled awed by its pages and have yet to find only a few equivalents in this digital era.

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This book was certainly one of the most important UW photo books ever. Rather like Doubilet's Water, Light, Time (but not DD's earlier books), CN's book was widely regarded as the best ever by nearly everyone from the moment it was released.

That said I think it has aged a lot. Probably because CN's style has been imitated more than DD's, but IMO I find that Within A Rainbow Sea to be pretty unremarkable in photographic terms in 2005. I agree that it is very well printed, though.

Alex

Just grabbed my fourth edition copy – First edition was October 1984, copyright date was also 1984. Just about all shot on K25 and K64 with a manual focus camera – Canon F-1. Some incredible colors and light balancing.

Tom

Within a Rainbow Sea was and is a very important book for me, along with In a Sea of Dreams (and Water, Light, Time) too, and if I have a "style" myself (which i tend to doubt), then there is no question that CN would have been a big influence. It's true that some of those shots look "easy" and less impressive now than they did when it came out, but the truth is that u/w photography is much easier now, esp. with digital - as I rediscovered last year when my digital housing was being serviced and I did a few dives with my old F801s film housing.

More important, I think all three of these books were very important in establishing underwater photography as a serious endeavor, and showing what could be done, both in terms of capturing images of extraordinary marine life, and also as a kind of art art. We've moved beyond those cliche underwater shots (the ubiquitious wide angle shots of a woman diver wearing a colored wetsuite and a full mask posed next to a wreck (or a bommy, or a seafan) with a flashlight in her hand), or the masked diver's head framed in the porthole of a wreck, etc. etc. CN and DD were among the photographers that made that happen.

Frogfish (Robert Delfs)