Night dive settings

[Jamdiver]

Hey all,

I'll be doing a night dive in the near future and since this will be my first dive at night with my camera, i'm curious to the sort of settings that you would recommend and do use currently.

For reference i'll be diving with a Canon A610 & housing no strobes and the only external light source would be my and buddies dive lights.
I figure i'll be limited to mostly macro subjects with this setup.

Thinking between 1/60s-1/200s and perhaps i'll push the ISO up to 100 to try and increase the light available.
Any and all suggestions are welcome.

 

[Monkey Knife-fight]

Not gonna get anything without using the internal flash. It also makes it much easier if you can attach a dive light in some way to the camera. It's pretty tricky (in my experience) to aim a dive light in one hand and focus/take the picture in the other hand. I use a pretty small mini Q40 LED light attached to my camera. It allows my camera to focus and doesn't blast critters and scare them away.

Otherwise settings are pretty similar to day dives. Just remember the only light you have is gonna be the internal flash so get close...and diffuse the internal flash if your camera can.

Chris

 

[Jamdiver]

Thanks Monkey,
I have a small secondary dive light, a princeton tec 40.
I'll see if I can figure out some way of attaching it to my housing to aid with focusing.

Thankfully I do have a diffuser plate so the lighting should be somewhat even, sticking to macro doesn't sound too bad at least my 'keeper' rate will be a bit higher that way .