Specialty in Photography

[MikeFerrara]

alexeames,

You are correct. It's not the number of dives that is important. The point I was trying to make was that I have seen lots of divers make a real mess of things in the interest of a picture. I have also seen divers come close to geting themselves (or others) hurt by their lack of situational awarnes while using a camera.

Mike

 

[Marvintpa]

From the posts above you can see that alot depends on the instructor. The PADI course outline is quite decent, but does not claim to be able to turn you into a photo pro in just a day or two.
Keep in mind that the way many people earn the ability to teach a specialty (after becoming a scuba instrcutor) is to do 20 dives of the type they wish to teach. If doing 20 dives with a camera made you a pro, then we'd all be taking perfect photos in no time, instead of taking years and years (and thousands and thousands of $$).
As with all courses, talk to the instructor, see some of his work, and evaluate carefully. Yes, there may be a few duds out there, but there are some real artists too.

 

[Seb]

Hey, I LIKE the 100 dive minimum. Great Idea. I had hundreds of dives before I even considered picking up a camera. If you have so few dives,. you have not enough experience to dive with a distracter ( I mean camera). I have seen more reef damage done by photo snappers than I care to remember. Most divers have no buoyancy control to speak of anyway, most fin constantly whether they need to or not, many fin rather than add air to their bc. And when these clueless creeps actually find a subject, they then take about a hundred pictures of the poor thing, blinding it ( no eyelids on fish, remember?) and crow about what a good shot they got. It brings to mind monkeys typing in a room to reproduce the works of Shakespeare. If you can't get your shot in five exposures, move on!

One reason I really like Bonaire is to get away from those people on the boats.