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My Equipment
My first underwater camera was a Nikonos III,
bought in 1980 on a business trip to Hong Kong. I soon upgraded
to a Nikonos V to get the benefits of aperture priority and the
wider choice of camera settings offered.
Almost immediately I started to customise my
kit with a series of add-on close-up lenses and framers, all interchangeable
underwater. This was followed by customised base trays, with additional
handles and a quick release for my strobe arm, adding ease of
use both in, and out of the water.
My move to a housed SLR camera was prompted by
the introduction of low cost housings, in the wake of the introduction
of the Nikon RS, a beautiful, but expensive, underwater camera
to replace the Nikonos series.
My choice was the ‘new’ Subal housing
for the Nikon 801S which I used for all my underwater pictures
for the next 8 years. Seeing my subject and image composition,
through the lens, increased my acceptable images per roll by more
than 40%
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In 2011, I upgraded from
the Fuji S2pro SLR in a Sea & Sea housing. to a D300
in a Sea & Sea Housing and still use my two 220 Inon
digital strobes.
I have also had to up-grade the Ring Flash
from TTL into the Digital world, by adding a power switch
with five settings. We are currently working on a new design
for use with the 60mm Macro port. Watch this space!
Custom designed 'bendy arms' have always
been, and still are, my favourite mounting for my strobes.
Exhaustive tests on different types of strobe arms convinced
me of the versatility, and ease of use, of the 'bendy arm'
in all lighting situations.
With a digital camera system comes a whole
new set of kit which includes on-location and travel digital
storage, plus a computer to process and archive images for
long-term storage once they are safely home. |
Once home there are many
back-up options available. My personal choices are dual
hard drives and DVD copies.
Experience has proved that you need more
than one travel storage device - just in case! I carry a
laptop for all long haul trips and I burn the day's images
onto a 500Gb WD portable hard drive as first back-up device.
I also carry 20 or so Compact flash cards,
one per day or dive so that I have triple back-up of my
trip incase things go badly wrong.
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Take a look at some of the custom built equipment
we have designed and built which is still available today.
click here >>>
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