Notes on using D70 in Ikelite Housing on recent dive trip
I recently had a wonderful trip on the Komodo Dancer using my brand new D-70 with Ikelite housing. I thought that my observations might be useful to others with this set up.
The Equipment.
Nikon D-70 with Ikelite housing. I took the 18-70mm lens, and my venerable 105mm macro lens. Ultralight arms, one Ikelite Substrobe 50 and one Nikonos SB-103 (Yes – I know that I need to turn it in for a 105). For aiming light I used the UK miniQ40 (The one that takes 4 AA batteries). Other equipment included an Anmann Energy 8 charger which will take 6 AA, or 4 C-cells at a time and a Lexar memory card at 512 meg. I used ports from my old Ikelite film system, and the dome port was not the right size for the zoom lens (It measured 5.25 inches in total length from the tip of the shade to the back of the port and seemed to be much deeper than needed). I also had a set of +4 diopter lens for the zoom.
Disclaimer – I don’t work for or represent any of these companies. These are only my impressions of the camera and set up. Any corrections or comments by those who know more are welcome. This post is kind of long. Apologies if it is in the wrong place.
General comments.
I like the camera and housing very much. It is wonderful for daytime macro where there is sufficient light for the auto-focus to work. Later in the trip I found a way to make night-time macro work also. I frequently found myself too close to the subject, and had to back up to get the camera to focus correctly. I intended to use the macro 60% of the time, and the zoom 40% - but I found the macro so enjoyable that I ended up using it on 90% of my dives.
Setting up for the trip.
I was planning on re-using my existing lenses, strobe arms, etc. I did not originally purchase the 18-70mm lens, and thought that I could use my existing tameron 28-105mm lens. Bad mistake. The field of view for above water was just not usable, so I got the Nikon 18- 70mm separately. I had a problem with the Ikelite housing. The ultralight balls that I had were designed for the older Ikelite arms, and were threaded to fit on a stud. The new housing has the different style of fitting. I finessed this (for the trip) by replacing the handles on the new housing with handles from an old 8080 Ikelite housing. This probably changed the buoyancy of the housing a bit, but it was not a major problem.
The Housing.
I have used several Ikelite housings over the years, and I find the D- 70 housing to be noticeably more refined than my previous housings. I like the fact that there is less air space in the housing. The control buttons are different heights so you can more easily distinguish them. There are separate controls for each button on the camera, instead of a wheel you turn and press to control the four direction buttons. The control for the rear control wheels can be pushed in when it does not firmly seat against the wheel (No more duct tape in the housing). The port latches seem easier to operate, and I like the safety on the main housing latch. I like the fact that the strobe connection and camera are all connected to the back housing plate (although when I tried to compose using my right eye, I would sometimes hit the connector with my mask) I really like the super-eye viewer. Setting it permanently in the housing, (instead of attaching it to the camera) seems to make for a much larger image. Unlike other comments I did not have problem with seeing the image. I found the location of the focus lock quite convenient.
A couple of quibbles. I wish there were a way to adjust the Viewfinder Diopter Adjustment Lever. I kept trapping my fingers between the handle and the main latches (But this could have been because I swapped out the handle). When I am removing the camera, I tended to want to put the back plate down on my work surface. This caused a bit of extra strain on the strobe chord. There is a tendency for the main o-ring to slip off of it’s grove when putting it the camera in the housing.
Camera set up.
I typically shot at 200ASA, in manual mode, usually auto focus. AutoFocus was set to ‘Single’ and the AF-area mode was set to Single area. I set image quality to Raw+Jpeg. White Balance to Flash. Shutter speed typically set to 1/60. I also set the Command Dial to ‘yes’ so the rear command dial would let me change my F-stop (I found it easier to manipulate that dial). I set the review to ‘Highlight’ so that after the shot I could take a quick look to see if I had too much light. (I made a check list of everything).
O-Ring problem.
On one occasion I was putting the camera together, and it just did not want to slide in the last 1/4 inch. After some work I was able to get it close enough to latch the back. I then looked through the back of the housing and realized that the housing o-ring had slipped out of it’s grove and I was compressing it (and did not have a good seal). I immediately un-latched. The o-ring was not permanently damaged, and no harm was done. If the camera does not want to go in, check your o-ring. (And thank you Ike for a clear housing).
A real modeling light.
Auto-focus for Macro, at night, is hard – especially if you like little stuff which I do. halfway through the trip I flooded my Ikelite strobe. This freed up two ultralight arm sections and gave me the idea of using the strobe arm to mount a ‘Real’ dive light to the housing to use as a modeling light. I mounted a Princeton Tec light (uses 8 C-cells) to a strobe arm with zip ties, and mounted it to one of the handles, and aimed it along the axis of the lens. This worked very well and let me focus on little critters at night. I put the other extra arm on my strobe side (giving me three sections, not two) and found that it gave me more flexibility and range. I intend to switch to using three arms per strobe, and to continue the mondo modeling light. I want to experiment with red filters to reduce the critter fright of the white light.
Take your camera cables.
Nikon provides a cable to let you plug the camera into the computer. Alternatively you can take out the card and insert it into the PCI slot on the computer, I chose the latter method, and it did not work very well. It was a real hassle removing the camera from the housing after (almost) every dive just to unload the pictures. If I had the cord I could have taken the camera out of the housing, but I would not have had to dismount the camera.
Battery Charger.
I believe in rechargeable batteries. The Anmann was (barely) able to keep up with me. I typically swapped out my strobe batteries after two dives.
Using the Zoom lens.
I was not terribly happy with the zoom set up. I expect that my port was the wrong length and this contributed to the problem. I found that even with the +4 diopter I could not get as close as I wanted to, and the lens was a lot wider angle than I was expecting.
WorkFlow.
In Tom Hogans book on the D70 (bythom.com. Excellent resource) he talks about workflow. Mine was as follows. Shoot in Raw and Jpeg. When I download the camera, load the dives shots into pictures/<tripname>/<dive#-date><DivesiteName>. When I do this I get a DCIM file created. I would review these images and toss out the awful ones, then I would copy the jpeg images to a folder parallel to DCIM, and import them into iPhoto. This gave me a convenient way to view and share my work on the trip, but it saved the raw image so I can do further culling and photoshop work at home.
Some images (Hoping I can figure out how to load these onto the site) I wanted to load up more than three, but the system would not let me. If interested I can do another post later)
