Haven't even gone to scuba class yet

I am going tonight to my first class and will be diving Cozumel in March. After I do the initial dives how long should I dive before considering taking my mind and dividing it from monitoring myself and surroundings to snapping some photos..

Also any recommendations on a camera. I have a Sony Digital that they make a case for but I don't know anything about if they have cameras that are single unit designed for underwater vs. land / water cameras or the benefits of either.

Thanks for the help I am really excited and looking forward to this.

Frank Cruz

I'm sure you'll get a lot of conflicting responses to this.

Like anything else, your personal proficiency will play into it.

My personal recommendation would be to take an Advanced Class where you are taught to task load dive and see how it goes.

I know a lot of people that go into Advanced right out of Open Water and they do just fine.

Don't even think of taking a camera UW until you are a proficient diver. You should be very comfortable with good buoyancy control. Advanced classes are an excellent way of gaining skills; but don't think getting a new card makes you a good diver. Only enough dives will put you in the comfort zone you need to be a good UW photographer. Spend your time learning you UW environment. It will pay dividends when you start shooting UW.

I trust that your first scuba class went well. Welcome to an amazing new world !! Give yourself some time to take in everything you will see on your first ocean trip :shock: before you take a camera down with you. You will miss a lot of neat things if you are fumbling with a camera. As the others have said, you should feel very comfortable with your buoyancy as well before trying photography. Some divers pick this up quickly and some take a little longer. You will know when your comfort level is where it should be. You might even consider taking an underwater photography class your last day in Cozumel. You can learn the basics with a very simple camera while under an instructors watchful eye. Check around to find an operator that you feel has your safety in mind. Cozumel has a lot of dive operations...some good, some not so good.

Echoing the previous responders, adding an underwater camera hugely multiplies the task loading at every stage in a dive. You want to be sure that you have more than just basic proficiency with the fundamental skills - they should already all be second-nature.

The fact that you will be spending much of your time staring through a viewfinder, and preoccupied with thinking about photographic subjects and technical decisions, also makes you intrinsically less reliable as a dive buddy. I never bring a camera if I'm diving with a relative beginner.

PADI doctrine aside, the reality of u/w photography on most liveaboards and many shore-based operations is that you will sometimes find yourself alone, whether by choice or involuntarily, as your buddy or the group moves on while you are engaged in making a photograph.

This means you need to be more self-reliant u/w and capable of self-rescue, if necessary, and you may want to consider ways to improve or increase the redundancy or reliability of vital gear. Since you're more likely to find yourself on your own, it's also vitally important that you carry your own emergency surface signalling equipment - a big SMB, or sausage, a whistle, a good light or flashing strobe, and perhaps more - on every dive. Everybody should, but many don't.

(For more on surface survival equipment and techniques, take a look at this article, which originally appeared in the 2002 Annual Edition of Asian Diver:

http://www.tabula-international.com/DIV/SMB4i.pdf

I don't want to knock PADI so-called "Advanced" Course, but it's badly misnamed. Taking this course will not make you an "advanced" diver. The reality is that this course just provides a few more supervised dives in a somewhat wider range of conditions - one so-called "deep" dive, a night dive, etc. - than you will have encountered in BOW training. . That's not a bad thing in itself, but I think you will probably want to get considerably more experience u/w under your belt before you think about taking a camera down with you.

One PADI course that I strongly DO recommend is the Rescue Diver course, which provides training in some very important basic skills and should dramatically enhance your capability to assist yourself or another diver in an emergency.

Frogfish