I'm not normally an UW photo guy but have been lurking here for some time asking some technical questions over in the other forums. I still don't own a housing but borrowed one this summer for use on an underwater archaeological excavation off the coast of Turkey. As there were other photographers on the site, my main focus was to create interactive panoramas of the site. You can't see a whole lot of the site because this was the final field season and most of the artifacts had been removed, but if you ever wanted to see what an underwater excavation looks like, check out the posts on my blog. Unfortunately, I can't post them directly here as they take a complex Flash player to view them. Sorry!
Oh yeah, did I mention it was a Roman ship from the 1st Century BC and in 150 feet of water?
That's really cool Drew! What equipment did you use?
Outstanding Drew. Thanks for sharing.
Bob
Thats awesome!
Thanks Everybody. It was a lot of fun.
As far as equipment goes, we had some trouble with that. Originally, I wanted to use my D3 and 16mm fisheye but we couldn't find the funds to house it for the project. Then I was supposed to be using a D70 in Subal housing that the project owned but there were a bunch of problems with it and we never got it working while I was there. I ended up borrowing a D200 with 10.5 fisheye in a Sea&Sea housing from one of the other photographers there. I made my own little panorama head and used a giant fixed tripod type thing that the site used for marking survey points as a tripod. The pictures themselves are 6-8 pictures around horizontally and a couple up and a couple down. Topside with a precise head its 6+1+1 but underwater I took more to ensure better overlap. I also did a couple of them hand held.
I'd really like to do it again and will do it a little bit differently, mainly having my own camera and taking a real tripod down. However, working at such a remote site you make do with what is at hand.
Thanks for sharing.
