After spending many hours in this forum as a guest trying to decide on a digital camera and housing, I thought I would officially join and share experience with Canon S70 with WP-DC40 housing.
On a recent trip, my buddy dove with a complete Nikon / Ikelite package digital SLR that cost about 3X more, so it was interesting to compare results.
Things I like about the S70 and the housing:
- Full range of manual controls, which I found to be invaluable.
- RAW mode (more later)
- Compact flash compatible
- 7.1 mp
- wider angle zoom
- very compact, so great for top-side pics as well
- shoots video
- "stitch mode" that guides you through stitching panorama's together.
- Color accuracy is excellent
- Underwater case is so small that it fits easily in my existing dive bag. No additional photo gear box.
- Internal flash was surprisingly effective for night shots.
- The housing has a lanyard freeing up one or both hands for other stuff while diving.
Things that I struggled with:
- Focus underwater on moving objects was a near crap-shoot. I tested manual focus and found it to be just equally good (or poor) as the case may be. Fixed objects with sufficient focusing light was fine.
- barrel of the housing obstructs the internal flash a bit in the lower right corner.
- without the housing, on the widest angle, the flash does not illuminate the entire scene.
- without the housing, the sliding front on the case is very sensitive, I constantly turn the camera off unintentionally.
- Macro focusing distance is difficult to manage underwater. Seems to be about a foot and 1/2.
My goal was to record underwater photos the way that I record topside photos, memory quality. No objective to take magazine quality, but I wanted them to be clear, well composed, and interesting. This camera and housing did the job with some perks added in.
I experimented like crazy with different features and found a few things that may help other u/w amatuers:
- Use RAW mode if you can. The ability for RAW to restore a photo is incredible. Once I set development conditions in Canon software, I converted all the RAW in batch and had amazing photos compared to the starting point. RAW worked much better than trying to do a real-time white-balance.
- Get a big card. I followed the advice on this forum and got a 2gig and 256 backup card. It made a lot of sense to me to minimize the number of times you have to open the case with an emphasis on never opening on the boat. The gig card gave me plenty of space for RAW and for video.
- Use a time setting above 1/100 of a second. Even if everything is focused, the picture will be out of focus just because everything is moving. I had much better results when I maintained shutter speeds at this level. To do this, I had to use manual mode rather than "P" mode.
- Everything is trade-offs. Even though I got some noise, I settled on ISO 200 so that I could shoot during the day with ambient light. Lowering the ISO and shooting with the flash during the day generally screwed up the shot except for close-up macro. Most of the shot would be subject to ambient light while the near item would be subjec to flash. There are no development conditions that I found that could get both lighting conditions simultaneously to work.
- Moving objects, other than turtles were nearly impossible to focus on. I still have a lot of work to go on this one relative to my guessing skills. But for sharks and stuff, I would set the focal length on about 10' and things worked out okay. Most of my small fish was the same way, but at a much smaller focal length. The S70 allows you to bracket the focus, taking three shots in a row with a slightly adjusted focus. Still, I threw a good number of shots away. The Canon has a great real-time review mode that allows you to zoom in and see if something is in focus. So for shots, I really cared about, I hung with it until I got what I wanted.
- For night dives, the brighter your dive light used as focusing light, the better the chances of a good focus. I had suprisingly good results at night with the internal flash.
- Enjoy the video option. What a kick to record video segments of a shark-sucker darting around the divers. You just can't get the same memory with a still.
- With everything set to manual and to RAW, the shutter delay was small. I can't say whether it was great due to my limited experience.
- Good luck attempting macro shots like in the books. This rig will not give it to you. Thoeretically, the focal length is about 6 inches on the wide angle. But underwater, I did not have much success at less than a foot to a foot and 1/2.
- Enjoy taking top-side pics in and around the boat. I felt kind of sorry for all of the dome-port folks. They couldn't capture any of the backward rolls, the surface interval events like going to see the red-footed booby birds, etc.
- Have two batteries. I found that one fully refreshed battery lasted just enough for two 45 minutes with some picture review as well.
All in all, this camera was a great choice for my objectives. It added a dimension to my diving that I had started to lose. Textures of corals and the intricacy of sea-fans starting pulling my attention again. The purple of a vase sponge or the green of a tube sponge seemed much more pronounced when trying to recreate their special look with a camera. While my Buddy with the SLR rig has much more potential, the incremental shot value on our fist dive was negligible.
I hope this was helpful.
Crazy06
