Starting Underwater Photography

[viekuence]

Hi,
I have just finished my diving course and would love to start underwater photography as a hobby. I don't want to spent a ton of $$$ but don't mind getting my wallet out for something decent.

I am a complete novice and am not too sure if I understand correctly when you talk about housings. Do you mean that you can use virtually any digital camera, buy a housing and presto bobs your uncle and you're taking award winning pictures ... If so I have a Canon Digital Ixus V3, would this work? if yes where do i get information on housing?

Cheers in advance

Viekuence

 

[ssra30]

Well, you will need to find a camera that have housing available.
However, I think that before you want to get into underwater photography, you need to have quite a few dives under your belt first. Before you want to start playing with a camera, make sure that you are perfectly comfortable with diving and have really good bouyancy control first. If you just finish your openwater course, I suggest that you go on a few dive trips and just enjoy the dives without having any complication with extra gears such as camera first. In the mean time, you can start thinking about film vs digital, the budget, etc. There are plenty of threads here talking about various cameras with various housings. If you want to go digital, most people go with Olympus, Canon, Sony or Nikon.
Check www.digideep.com for information and camera and available housing.

 

[viekuence]

Thanks for you answer. I should have said I have just completed Divemaster so have a couple of dives under the belt.

Ikelite.com sells a housing for "Housing for S-100 & S-110, Digital Ixus, Ixus V" not sure if the V3 falls under this. I have emailed them.

Thanks again

 

[Former FLL Now MSP Diver]

The Canon Digital Ixus V3 is marketed as the S230 Digital ELPH here in North America. Canon makes underwater housings for most of their digital line.

A quick search on their US website comes up with the WP-DC600 housing.

Though listed as US$240 on the Canon website, these can be had for a little as US$159.

Hope this helps.

Marc

 

[Scubatooth]

if your just starting out and the fact that you have the ixus (ie the elph 230) and that there is housing for it from canon that would be the best to start out with and if you get more serious you can upgrade from there (ie more $$$)

after you get the housing and have used it for a while then to start thinking about a strobe

If you have any question feel free to ask

 

[ssra30]

Viekuence, opps, I apologized for making an incorrect assumption.
When most people said that they just finished their diving course, I assume that it is open water
Anyhow, I think your camera should be ok for a starting camera.
However, if you eventually want to upgrade the camera, you will need to get a new housing also since housing is generally model specific.
Basically I think that eventually you will find that 2x optical zoom is a bit limiting. Also F/2.8-4.0 does not give you a lot of flexibility when taking a picture but macro mode seems quite good.
So it is a matter of if you just want to spend a bit of money now and just get the housing but I think in the long run, you probably find yourself thinking about upgrading and will need to get both new camera and housing or just sink some money now and get a camera set up that you could be happier with for a longer period of time.

I also use Ikelite housing for my Olympus and like it a lot. However their housing are generally quite a bit more expensive. For the price, you are already more than half way to an Olympus C5050 with PT-015 housing or similar set up by Canon which I think you would be much happier with than the S230 with Ikelite housing.

 

[orangeBloke]

One other thing to remember about the Canon housings is that they're only guaranteed to 30m, at least the ones I've seen, so I'd check the depth rating for the Ixus one if you plan to go deeper than that at any time