Digital pictures from your first photo dive

In a couple of months I am speaking at the Visions in the Sea conference (London, UK) on digital UW photography. I see this as a great opportunity to preach digital to a lot of experienced film photographers.

As part of my introduction I want to highlight the proliferation of digital cameras UW. According to the digideep boys over 250 digicams have housing options and 233 housings have already been offered for digi-cameras. The Nikon D100 is the camera with the most housing options at 13 (and counting).

In the second part of my introduction I want to argue that digital cameras are better tools for starting underwater photography because it is easier to get pleasing results with them compared with film cameras. (with the advantages of instant image review and auto-white balance to remove any blue cast from being to far away from the subject etc). And as a result digital cameras are introducing lots of people to UW photography without the years of disasterous pictures that those of us who started on film suffered! It is all pretty light-hearted.

I am just trying to bring people's attention to the massive changes that digi-cams are bringing to UW photography - and they should listen to the rest of my talk!

Anyway to illustrate this I am looking for a couple of pictures taken by new photographers on their first dive with a camera underwater (their first camera must be digital). To demonstrate the great shots you guys have achieved without previous experience - and let the audience compare them to our awful first attempts on film! If you would like to contribute to my talk please email me at atmu@soc.soton.ac.uk - I will of course credit any images that I use.

Alex

Thinking about that. If I am arguing that instant image review helps you learn - then I would like to extend it to images taken during your first dive trip with a camera.

Alex

My wife will be doing her first underwater photography, with a digicam, in Grand Cayman at the end of October. And it will be a week long trip, so she has some time to develop (egregious silver-halide pun intended :ph34r:). I will try and remember this request and get you some examples in early November, if that is enough time.

My first underwater digital photograph was of my console in my rinsing tub this weekend just past. It was better than my first film image :angryfire:. Of course, I deleted it :freak:.

Alex,

Perfect! I used this exact comparison is a talk I gave to HUPS last year - showing my improvement in 1 year of shooting digital. I will fwd you some photos from my first dive - w/ the Coolpix 990

Cheers

James

Alex,

Feel free to consider any of the images that are on my page of my website as they were all taken this past March just after I bought the Oly 5050 and PT-015 and YS90DX. I was diving with Ocean Frontiers, as you know, on the east End. The images on Barbara's page were all first time shots with a Nikonos V. Both of us had MX-10s before for about 4 years with variable results. Don't know if this is what you were looking for or not. BTW, I have been a Nikon shooter all of my life and Barbara has always been an Olympus shooter so it was a real switch for me to go Oly and her to go Nikon, but I'm the computer person and she's the arts one.

TedJ www.tedjanssen.com

Alex - I don't have any example photos (actually, because I had been shooting a Nikonos V for so many years, my first housed U/W photos - both film and digital - were pretty good, at least for me.

I recently had a long email discussion with my brother-in-law, who is a pretty good advanced amateur (topside). He loves film, and he has no current plans to change to digital. He basically prints his color slides "as-is," apparently believing that photographic purism demands that you get the shot, the whole shot, and nothing but the shot at the moment of exposure.

I understand his concerns about the technology versus photography issue, but personally I have to disagree. I remember back 25-30 years ago when some "purists" contended that the single image you captured at the instant of exposure was what you had, and that manmade "improvements" such as double exposures, darkroom tricks, etc., invalidated your work. I thought that was baloney then, and I still do. Art is art, however you want to do it. Once people have gotten down the fundamentals of digital editing, they are going to go out and take pictures - and lots of them. The immediate feedback from digital photography shortens the learning curve enormously, and I think this will make photography even more popular. Just as a practical matter, how many times have you wanted to take 1-2 shots, but you hated to kill a whole roll (so you either didn't take the shot, or you burned a whole roll [=$$] and made two round-trips to the photo lab)? You're hearing a lot now about the technology and the editing software, but in another 2-3 years, film will be virtually dead, and people will accept the technology challenges as a matter of course, like having to learn Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. Ultimately, more people will be taking more photographs and having more fun doing it, which I see as a good thing.

Well, I'm really rambling, but I think that my comments apply just as much to U/W photography as with topside. I use my D100 a lot more for topside photography than for underwater (the unavoidable consequence of a limited budget!), and I have never had more fun in my life with photography.

Thanks everyone for contributing to this thread. I think I now have offers for all the images I need.

I am also pleased to report that BSoUP (Brit's Soc of UW Photo) is really starting to get stuck into the digital issue. Which is great news for UK snappers. At last night's meeting Mark Walker gave a talk on his first two trips with digital. The talk invoked a very lively discussion throughout, from the audience - as Mark wanted. Mark is a wetpixelite by the way - and gave the site a plug at the end of his talk. Mark is one of the UK's most artistic photographers, with a great eye for dynamic composition. And I was encouraged about the versatility of digital since his pictures looked so different from mine despite using the same camera.

On the other hand, I procceeded to drag the Society back into the past - giving a short talk on medium format and my experiences using a Hasselblad UW, a camera that is older than I am! So it is not all progress!

Alex

Alex - If you'll indulge me just a bit more...

About three years ago, my wife/dive buddy and I attended the basic Nikon School. Bill Durrence was the instructor, and if you've met Bill, you know what a good photographer and instructor he is. Bill encouraged everyone to constantly experiment and to be creative. His refrain was "It's only film." He was right, of course. Film and processing were/are cheap, especially if you buy gray market film in 10/20-roll boxes.

Recently we attended the Nikon School of advanced digital workflow. Again, the instructor was Bill Durrence, who is heavily into digital these days. As before, he urged the attendees to experiment with their photography and editing. As true as his words "It's only film" were three years ago, the phrase "It's only memory" is even more true today.

I may not be articulating myself very well, and I'm sorry if I'm drifting off the topic, but the new ability to take photographs without investments in film and processing, and the abilty to (relatively) easily edit your photographs is to me as exciting as the development of the 35mm camera was in another era.

Sorry about the rambling, but I'm home sick with a cold today, and the use of large quantities of cough syrup seems to have a profound effect on my thinking.

Hi Alex,

I'm Norman from Manila (Philippines). Feel free to use any of my pictures at www.pbase.com/naquino/tubbataha.

All the pictures in the album were "first time" shots using my 5050z. My first camera was the 4040z which I bought in November last year. I only used it for a month, after which I upgraded to the 5050z. I wasn't able to use the 4040z on a real dive.

Most of the pictures in the album were macro shots using internal flash only. I have to say that since I bought a digital camera, my progress had been really fast. Of course, it's not just a matter of shooting away with a digital camera. I also think one has to do some reading and try to understand what it is all about.

Regards,

Norman/Swordfish

I'm this is a photo taken by my wife in our *first* camera dive. It was image nº 150 with that camera (most of the previous ones where tests on surface to get used to the controls)

The image is not postprocessed nor adjusted levels.

Its a Canon Powershot A70 (quite basic) with its canon hosing. ( about using red filters and manually adjust WB. I used and old white plastic US Navy dive tables to tune White Balance and the Macro option.

Side Notes:

In fact I discovered Wetpixel via a link to *that* post... thx for it, it was really insightful.

I also tried to post this image once in WetPixel (in the Photo Crirtique) but something happenned (probably I did not register correctly) because both my account and my post dissappeared in a 24 hr. period... When later on I register again as a Wetpixel user i was too lazy to re-post that image again...