Greetings from a snorkeler

[Ranga]

You are in their nest cone zone, which is wider at the top. Turn around, putting your fins between you and the fish, then swim horizontally in the direction you came from to stop attack.
View attachment 845244
Titan triggerfish – mean or misunderstood?

People always talk about the cone, but this is more my experience with triggerfish...

 

[iancampbell]

Great! I'd like to pick your brains about a few things if you don't mind. Haven't encountered another snorkeler who used a camera with a sensor larger than 1" before. And I think snorkeling and diving present quite different photographic challenges/requirements.

I definitely agree on the different challenges for snorkelers and divers. At the surface, you're at the mercy of the chop, and even on a calm day, the water surface is going to move you a little bit no matter how steady your hands are. When I first got my E-PL10, I watched the Backscatter recommended settings video about 30 times before I first got in the water...which is when I instantly discovered that those settings weren't going to work.

– I've used the OM-1 and its predecessors for many years above the water for bird and insect photography. But I find I I'm not missing much about the OM-1 versus the EM-10 iv (which basically has the same sensor) underwater. The main thing I wonder about is the autofocus. I get a lot of mis-focused shots when a subject (usually a fish) is moving against a busy background – in my experience that is the most challenging situation for any camera's autofocus. I find above the water it is also challenging for the OM-1 (e.g. birds in flight), though I find the creature detect AI can help a lot with birds jumping around in foliage. How do you find the OM-1 autofocus for fish? A clear improvement over the E-PL10? I would think creature detect might help in some situations, but less so when there are multiple fish in the frame, as is often the case.

I can't comment on the OM-1 vs the EM-10iv specifically as I never had the EM, but the reason I moved up to the OM-1 was for the IBIS. In my time snorkeling with the E-PL10, I ended up with so many shots with motion blur--it wasn't missed focus, it was simply that the motion of the water was moving me by a few pixels on the sensor (how many microns is that?) over the course of a shutter actuation. I won't pretend that I never got a blurry shot with the OM-1, but my hit rate substantially improved.

As for the auto-focus, that was also a massive improvement. The AI detection was no help underwater (in fact, I had to turn it off because occasionally it would decide that a feature on the coral in the background was a cat or something) but the upgrade to phase-detection autofocus over contrast autofocus was a game changer. With my E-PL10, the subject tracking autofocus was more or less useless as a snorkeler (I suspect I was moving too much for it to keep up) whereas I use it every day now with the OM-1. It's wonderful.

As I said, I don't use the AI creature detection as it didn't seem to help with fish and occasionally seemed to hurt, but the customization modes for autofocus points on the OM-1 were also a huge improvement over the other underwater cameras I've used. I could really dial it in to where I position the camera when I identify my quarry, then use back button autofocus to activate tracking while I compose the shot.

-- What lens or lenses do you use? I use the 14-42mm EZ; super light and gives me flexibility similar to a TG to shoot both wide and close as the situation dictates. (I also have the 60 and 90mm macro lenses but only use those above water because I want the flexibility to go wider and don't want to carry bulky dome ports; plus, I'm skeptical that high end optics have much benefit in most underwater situations given the other limiting factors.)

I use the 14-42mm EZ as well, with the AOI UWL-09Pro wet lens on my housing for exactly the same reason as you. I can get great close focus wide angle using that combination, which is as good as I could ever hope as a snorkeler. Realistically, I'm never going to get a pygmy seahorse or a Shaun the Sheep nudi snorkeling anyway, so no need for macro lenses underwater. The UWL-09 Pro is a glorious lens but pure glass and not very light topside. When I used the TG-5, I had the FCON-T01 wide angle converter as well. I love that you can get closer with these without filling the frame, which means less chance for hazy water or loss of red colors.

I just bought the 90mm macro too and it's currently on a USPS truck headed my way! I can't wait to play with that, but probably topside only.

– How are you carrying your rig? One of the reasons I opted for the EM-10 iv was I wanted something light that would be easy to carry on a wrist lanyard, like a TG. I'm leery of the big metal bracket approach, especially if I need to battle the current. But I assume you will need to go that route if you opt for strobes.

Yeah, underwater thus far I've also only had the wrist strap on my housing and it's worked great. I snorkel in a rash guard, and I specifically shop for rash guards that have the thumb slits so that the sleeves can't ride up your arm. The benefit of this is that I can put the wrist strap on my hand, then slide the rash guard up and put my thumb through the slit. Now that camera's not going anywhere even if I have to release it and let it dangle in an emergency.

I've never shot underwater with strobes, but... guess what's sitting on my table right now waiting to get wet for the first time. I just picked up two of the new Hybrid Flash strobes from Backscatter and the associated tray/arms/etc. The whole setup is a lot heavier (15 pounds on land on my bathroom scale), but I'm really hoping the results will speak for themselves. If not, watch the classifieds section the next few months for a good deal on two Hybrid Flash units....

– I'm considering getting maybe one strobe for night snorkels. I haven't had much problem with low light – though so far I've been fortunate in having plenty of sun during my snorkels. My exposure approach so far is to set a minimum shutter speed of about 1/200 and Max ISO of 12,800. I then use auto exposure and DxO pure raw in post to control noise if necessary – though my ISO rarely gets high.

For my night snorkels, I've always just used my underwater flashlight. It's substantially inferior to a strobe in terms of light distribution (hot spots everywhere that would take weeks to clean up in Lightroom) but works ok as long as you can hold the camera steady with one hand. If you want to try a strobe for night use, think about whether you could mount it on the cold shoe of your housing. That's a lot less bulky than getting a tray.

Daytime, your settings sound very reasonable. I usually shoot aperture priority and tend to open the 14-42mm EZ up as wide as it will go at a given zoom. I watch the shutter speed, and I assume that any time it goes below 1/120, the shot didn't work, and I manually elevate the ISO accordingly. With the E-PL10, I had to keep the ISO pretty low (sub-1200) without grain becoming noticeable. With the OM-1, that was no longer a problem, and I could easily crank it sky high without a meaningful loss in quality.

 

[iancampbell]

I went on my first snorkel venture tour last October (to Raja Ampat). It was very good, and I saw a lot of stuff I would not have seen on my own. Before that I did several days of snorkeling solo at Walindi Plantation Resort in New Britain (before I joined a bird tour). They definitely didn't value me as much as if I had been diving, so that was a definite downside; I haven't heard of any snorkel tours going there – so perhaps how they treat you at a dive resort is a matter of getting educated by those tours.

I'm going on snorkel venture's Alor/Komodo tour in October. Really looking forward to it. But their tours are getting quite expensive now – especially if, like me, you have to pay the single supplement. I'm next going with Oceanic Society to Gardens of the Queen in Cuba in March. I'm now looking for something for 2026 (I'm recently retired, so timing isn't complicated for me). Do you recommend Palau? Any other recommendations of places to go, bearing in mind that the Caribbean isn't what it once was and is unlikely to get better soon.

Wow, you and I have very similar travel plans and taste in cameras! Snorkel Venture is a fantastic organization. I've done 3 tours with them now and although I don't have anything booked at the moment, I anticipate there will be more. I went to Palau in 2022 (right after pandemic travel restrictions lifted), Misool/Wakatobi in 2023, and I just got back from Alor/Komodo in April. I, too, pay the single supplement, which hurts although after being on a liveaboard in Palau, I have very little desire to share a room with a stranger at this point in my life. I'm actually headed to Gardens of the Queen in Cuba in December on a Snorkeling Etc. trip this year! I got on the waitlist over a year ago, and a spot just opened up about a month ago.

I was on the unlucky Snorkel Venture tour to Alor/Komodo that had a rough time in Komodo. If you haven't heard, Komodo Dive Resort is under new ownership, and the new folks running the underwater operations are absolute buffoons. I wrote a very frank TripAdvisor review and, if you're a member of the Facebook group Snorkeling Travel Friends, an even more detailed review there. That said, I don't mean to scare you--I think you should still go and that you will have an amazing time. Ben from Snorkel Venture was extremely responsive to the problems we had and, as result, completely took over underwater operations for his tours and is now using Komodo Dive Resort as basically a hotel and restaurant but not a snorkel provider. I'm not sure if they're even providing the boats any more, because of how bad our experience was. Snorkel Venture's tour leader Marcus ran the dive shop at Komodo for 5 years before he left to be a full-time Snorkel Venture employee, so I'm pretty sure he'll be running your trip and boxing out the knuckleheads from Neptune Diving (who run the dive shop there) from screwing things up more than they already have. Marcus wasn't on my trip, but I hear great things and I'm confident you'll be in good hands.

I don't mean to scare you there--happy to discuss more if this makes you uneasy. My group's experience with Komodo Dive Resort was awful, but I'm equally convinced that this was atypical for Snorkel Venture tours and that SV was blindsided by how incompetent the brand new dive center management was. Ben and his team have been extremely responsive in providing assurances that they have made substantial changes to the tour to prevent others from repeating our experience. To me, this speaks volumes about his dedication to providing an outstanding experience for snorkelers, and I wouldn't hesitate to join another SV tour when the scheduling works out.

Yes, the Caribbean is rough for snorkelers these days. When I was a kid, we would go to St. John and snorkel Cinnamon Bay and stay in the campground. I had heard that it was thrashed by hurricanes and decided to go back just to check it out last year. The weather unfortunately wasn't good for snorkeling so I only got 1 1/2 days in the water, but regrowth is definitely in progress. Perhaps in another decade, St. John will be pretty decent again even if not a full return to its former glory. In Alor, I absolutely fell in love with muck snorkeling and I can't wait to do that again. I hear that St. Vincent has some nice muck. Not sure if that's only at diving depths or if snorkelers can enjoy it too. I've been to Belize (pretty good, not Indonesia but definitely better than Florida) and I hear that Roatan is fantastic. Hawaii has some solid spots off the big island if you can get away from the crowds standing on the coral and chasing the turtles.

Palau was phenomenal, and I would go back in a heartbeat. The underwater world was extremely healthy, and my experience with Snorkel Venture there (the liveaboard portion was run by the Aggressor II) was outstanding.

 

[Bubblesong]

I love both scuba and snorkeling on the same day, and at night. After tank run out, why stop having fun?
For photography, scuba helps you stay still on the bottom of few feet for long video. But snorkel doesn’t have noisy bubbles. They both are good for photo of different species.

 

[Chavodel8en]

Welcome. If I was a better swimmer, I may have remained a snorkeler. But those pesky fish wont sit still for portraits, so I had to turn to scuba.

 

[Trilobite]

I was on the unlucky Snorkel Venture tour to Alor/Komodo that had a rough time in Komodo. If you haven't heard, Komodo Dive Resort is under new ownership, and the new folks running the underwater operations are absolute buffoons.

Thanks. Just a quick note on this: I think the name on Trip Advisor of the place you are referring to is "Komodo Resort & Diving Club" not "Komodo Dive Resort"?

 

[iancampbell]

Thanks. Just a quick note on this: I think the name on Trip Advisor of the place you are referring to is "Komodo Resort & Diving Club" not "Komodo Dive Resort"?

That's correct. It seems to go by a few different names depending on which website you're looking at, but as far as I can tell, they're all the same place.

Seriously, even if the dive center doesn't have its act together, the house reef alone is worth going to Komodo. You could spend hours every day (and night) on the house reef and never get bored. The fact that the resort's boat and guide setup was a mess wouldn't prevent you from just living face-down on the house reef all day and occasionally getting out to eat...

 

[Trilobite]

As for the auto-focus, that was also a massive improvement.

You have me considering getting a housing for my OM-1. Have you had any issues with fogging in your housing? I got fogging repeatedly after my camera heated up from heavy use (I do a lot of burst shooting) which seems to take about 40 minutes to an hour. I loaded it at Papua Explorers resort which doesn't have air conditioning, so that is another factor.

 

[iancampbell]

You have me considering getting a housing for my OM-1. Have you had any issues with fogging in your housing? I got fogging repeatedly after my camera heated up from heavy use (I do a lot of burst shooting) which seems to take about 40 minutes to an hour. I loaded it at Papua Explorers resort which doesn't have air conditioning, so that is another factor.

I shoot similarly--better to click now and delete later. Yes, there was one day that I did get a bit of fogging despite loading it in the air conditioned camera room at Alami Alor where it had been all night. From that day onward, I crammed as many silica packets as I could fit in the housing and never had another problem. Luckily, I had brought a 50-pack of Wisesorb packets that I got for $5 on Amazon.

 

[agilis]

I only vacation where I can snorkel from shore after a morning scuba dive. I like to spend an entire afternoon in the water snorkeling. Scuba is great but once a day is enough for me, as long as I get to snorkel on my own for a few hours. I don't do photography. Too much like work.