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CAMERA
Have you dived the wreck of the Dunraven in the Egyptian Red Sea? It was discovered by Israeli pioneer diver Howard Rosenstein, who now manufactures and markets Fantasea underwater housings for cameras.
The Fantasea CP-6 is intended for use with the Nikon Coolpix 5600, an entry-level digital camera that is, at 85 x 60 x 35mm, quite small. The housing leaves a lot of space around it but is still compact enough conceivably to fit in a BC pocket.
The Coolpix 5600 sells at an entry-level price, so it makes sense that the Fantasea housing is inexpensive too. Together they amount to an outlay of less than £300. Not much to get you started, eh? Not when you consider that I normally take around £6000 worth of kit to do the same thing. That is, get a few photos while under water!
The Coolpix 5600 is a 5.1 megapixel camera.
I am not sure why we are so obsessed with megapixels but digital camera makers have latched on to it as a selling ploy. However, bear in mind that many professional digital cameras are hardly rated higher in the megapixel stakes and yet they produce top-quality pictures.
So don't get your hopes of this little snapper too high.
I read the instruction manual (yes, I really do that!) and waded past acres of explanation of how to frame up a shot correctly until I found the set-up options. This camera has some pre-set scene set-ups including one for under water and, guess what, I went for that.
The camera also has a built-in flash and I chose to have that permanently operating because my experience tells me that shots taken with natural light at more than a few metres deep are rarely successful. There is an independent "white-balance" setting but if there is no red light penetrating the water, it doesn't matter how much you crank up the red side of the computer's receptor, your pictures will still stay blue.
Relying on the built-in flash of the camera meant that I was fairly limited on distance at which it would be effective.
I decided that around 80cm was probably as far as I was going to get from a subject and still have it lit with white light.
That means portraits of your buddy as the biggest subject.
The housing incorporates a neat diffuser for the flash, which proved very useful when doing close-ups. The results looked evenly and naturally lit.
Fantasea also does a nice little multiple LED aiming light.
I had this mounted on a tray and arm in the way in which you might mount an ancillary flashgun. It contributed little to the overall exposure but helped the autofocus work.
The Fantasea CP-6 housing is as simple as you can get. You turn the camera on and drop it into its preordained place, closing the housing by a single large plastic clam catch so that it seals on a large watertight gasket.
Unlike piston O-rings, a gasket does not need greasing. However, you do need to be careful not to jam the lanyard in the housing when you do this - more easily said than done.
I countered condensation problems when taking the sealed housing from the warm but damp aft deck of the boat into colder water by inserting a fresh lady's tampon alongside the camera to soak up dampness in the internal atmosphere. Keeping one half of the "bullet" still in its cellophane wrapper stops the whole thing from fluffing up uncontrollably.
The extended lens of the switched-on camera neatly slips into a black plastic funnel within the housing, which stops internal reflections from the built-in flash.
Putting the camera in after switching it on, and so leaving it turned on, is quite heavy on the two AA batteries. There is the option of a battery-saving "sleep" mode after five minutes, but I was disappointed to find that once the camera went to sleep there was only one way to wake it up, and that was to push the on/off button rather than the shutter release.
The Fantasea CP-6 housing does not supply a button to do this, so if your camera goes to "sleep" during the dive, it's "goodnight nurse"!
The LCD monitor also switches off to save battery power, to be reawakened by the shutter-release button. I adjusted the Auto Off setting
to 30 minutes but it's amazing how long it can be before getting in the water if there is a long RIB ride to the dive-site.
The better option is to use rechargeable ni-mh batteries and charge them up before every dive. This allowed me to keep the camera awake by taking the odd, and I mean odd, snap during the RIB ride.
Grab-time with flash looked to be close to a second. This
is a significant amount of time when photographing anything not prepared to sit still and pose. As usual with these inexpensive cameras, this resulted in me photographing
a lot of spaces recently vacated by fish. Even pictures of anemonefish took a lot of attempts and patience.
Sedentary animals such as scorpionfish and stonefish proved easy enough, as did close-ups of soft coral, and a big moray eel was confident enough in its threateningly defensive behaviour to sit for its picture.
Grab-time is important, too, because you need to hold the camera still while you're shooting, so focus and hence sharpness can alter. You also need to avoid the temptation to snatch the camera away before it has successfully completed the job, resulting in a blurred picture.
The LCD monitor is big and easy to see under water, but no help in telling you if your pictures are sharp. The sharpest picture I took with the Coolpix 5600 under water was of my own eyebrow but then, I was a very co-operative subject.
The camera took about 10 seconds to prepare for the next shot when used with its flash. That can seem like ages, too.
The controls offered by the Fantasea CP-6 housing include the zoom, which you do not need. Set the camera to its widest-angle setting and get as close to your subject as needed. This will give the optimum sharpness.
You can turn the flash on or off and you can switch from normal to macro close-up mode. This is useful. You can also review your results under water but you can't discard them, as there is no access to the rubbish bin button.
I put in a 512Mb SD memory card, which gave me 201 pictures in the highest quality setting or 624 at what Nikon calls "normal" quality, which I guess is suitable for sending irritating e-mails with pictures of where you have been to your friends. The camera also has a limited internal memory that will record five pictures at the highest quality setting.
I persevered with the Coolpix 5600 and got to understand its limitations. I chose co-operative subjects and concentrated on close-ups of them. In this way I got some very reasonable results in high-quality jpeg format.
The camera will also shoot short video clips. It is a good starting point on the road to digital snaps, but I fear that many who begin their journey here will end up proud owners of digital single-lens-reflex cameras and masses of other expensive equipment.
Nikon Coolpix 5600 £170. Fantasea CP-6 Housing £115. Fantasea LED focusing light £45. Arm & tray £48.
Big Blue Squid 02892639992, www.bigbluesquid.com
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+ A really cheap way to break into U/W photography
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- Don't expect always to get fabulous results
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HEADGEAR
You lose the highest percentage of body heat through your head, yet so often when out in boats enjoying the cooling effect of evaporation after diving, we leave our heads uncovered or simply try to keep the sun off.
Weezle makes a popular undersuit, filled with technically advanced micro-fibres that can crush down or expand to fill whatever space is available. The filling is also machine-washable. It now makes a Russian-style hat from the same materials, so presumably it is equally thermally efficient.
I was off to a wintry Sharm el Sheikh and wanted to blend in. What better than to wear a Russian-style hat, now that the Russians have taken over from the Italians as Sharm's fastest-growing band of visiting sun-worshippers?
I jest, of course. It was never cool enough to want to wear it there, but on a November day in Twickenham I felt the first bite of a hard winter and decided to wear it on my bike. I did, that is, until my six-year-old daughter decided that she wanted to wear it.
Well, she refuses to wear woolly tights, a vest, her school cardigan or her gloves, so I thought at least we could keep her head warm as she rode her bike to school.
The great thing about Weezle products is that they screw up to nothing, so once I had confiscated it from her at the classroom door, it was no problem to stuff it in my pocket until I wanted to wear it myself.
Climbing out of an icy inland lake in November was a good time to encase my head in a bit of effective insulation and it did well. This is a very effective hat that keeps both head and ears protected from the wind, takes nothing in the way of maintenance except the occasional wash, and packs away unobtrusively.
Its leather lace can also be tied to avoid that hat-blown-off embarrassment suffered by those unused to travelling in open boats at speed.
That said, I'm not sure if the Weezle hat is warmer than my Whistler woolly ski-hat, which I usually wear pulled well down over my ears. It's close, but then, the Weezle can be thrown into the washing machine any evening, yet be dry by morning. I intend to give this product a continuing long-term test.
The Weezle Russian-style hat costs £25.
Weezle Diving Services 01535 655380, www.weezle.co.uk
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- Requires a certain sort of confidence to wear
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FINS
No mention of Force fins should ever be made without reference to their inventor and manufacturer Bob Evans. he was born in Paris but is resident in California. Think of the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Fockers.
It took someone completely off-the-wall to radically rethink diving fins at a time when they all looked exactly the same and were made of the same black rubber. Bob uses solid polyurethane and casts the material by hand in his own moulds in small batches, and this gives him the opportunity to make ongoing adjustments.
Since his first fins came on the market, he has come up with hundreds of designs, some of which are wacky enough to make the original Force Pro fins look staid by comparison.
They have always done well in our side-by-side comparisons and under the precise eye of our underwater speedometers, but it's been about 10 years since I last used a pair and reported on them in these pages.
I recently took some to the Red Sea, and enlisted the support of closed-circuit rebreather diver Simon Powell in investigating their unique properties.
Force fins are virtually indestructible. They are small and take up no room in the dive bag, but you could fold them up without doing any lasting damage. The material has a great ability to retain its original shape.
They are kept on the foot by a simple length of elastic cord. Bob insists that because the action of using them forces them onto the foot, you need nothing more. The elastic is there simply to stop them falling off when you are at rest.
The foot rests in an arch of material and is gripped across the top so that the boot toes are free to wiggle. At first glance, one can hardly believe they will be effective.
First impressions on hitting the water are that you have forgotten to put your fins on, because they are so compact, even in size XL, and there seems to be so little water resistance. It is slightly disturbing at first.
They may be convenient for walking about on deck because they are so small, but Simon and I both found that they were very slippery when climbing back up the ladder of the boat after diving, so we chose to take them off in the water beforehand.
I followed Simon around the wreck of the Carnatic. He was wearing the Force Pros and I had another pair of fins that always come at or near the top of the performance table.
I was attempting to get a good rear-view photo of the Force Pro fins in action, and can tell you that when Simon put his head down and went for it, there seemed to be no catching him. These fins certainly work at sprinting speeds.
However, when he was simply cruising I was never able to anticipate which way he was going to move his fins next.
Once I put them on to my own feet, the reason became apparent. I found that the Force Pros put little or no loading onto my legs. They were as easy to use as no fins at all. If I straightened my legs and went for a fast flutter-kick, I made lots of quick forward progress.
That said, once I relaxed and dawdled, I encountered the polished-floor effect. There seemed to be nothing to stop my feet sliding through the water sideways. I felt I was always in danger of skidding. My feet tended to drift off in random directions.
When intent on hurtling forwards, they worked well. When I wanted to stop and hold a position, to look at or photograph something, I found it necessary to spread my legs wide to avoid rotating about my own axis.
The original VW Beetles were an undeniable sales success. Millions of people drove them worldwide. This did not stop me disliking them, and I never owned one. I always felt that the front end was about to lift off at motorway speeds, even though it never did.
I decided that a Beetle was OK once you got used to its quirkiness but that it was a car best for other people.
I feel the same about the Force Pro fins. I can understand why they have such a strong and loyal following, and I think they're great, but for everyone else. Those who suffer from leg cramps due to the action of heavy finning should also consider them as an option. However, I enjoy a slow heartbeat and a long, leisurely finning action. The fast flutter kick is not something I can or want to sustain.
Remember, fins are merely like a set of tyres. You can choose your fins but you are stuck with the engine with which you were supplied, and my motor revs rather slowly.
Sizes are slightly weird, too. My size 11 feet in wetsuit boots were exceedingly snug in a pair of XL fins. I would not have got my drysuit boots into anything smaller than XXXL.
Made in small batches from an expensive raw material, these fins are not cheap, either.
Force Pro fins are available in notional sizes M to XXXL in yellow or black, and cost £137 per pair.
Poseidon Diving Systems 01420 8430909,
www.poseidon-uk.co.uk
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+ Effective
+ Long-lasting
+ Easy to pack
+ Good straight-line performance
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- You need to know how to use them
- Poor cornering
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LIGHT
I remember when the first LED lamps came out. Angry manufacturers phoned to tell me that I was ruining their business because I told people that their unfocused beams from clusters of diodes were useless when it came to use under water.
Then the Luxeon Star LED high-output LED was introduced, and I had to eat my words.
The Seacsub X-LED is hardly bigger than the lamphead of some umbilical lights, but it is quite heavy. Weighing in at almost a kilo, its anatomical shape could make it into a handy cosh if you were so inclined.
It is rated to 200m, and I can believe it. It is strongly made of anodised aluminium and features a pressure-relief valve for any gases given off by the batteries inside.
There are three high-output LEDs, each in its own reflector, and the lamp is switched on by rotating a collar with nice feely bits that will come in useful in poor visibility.
The collar operates a magnetic switch with détente to avoid it coming on inadvertently in your bag.
Eight AA batteries give a total burntime of 16 hours, but this is delivered in a clever electronic way. The lamp will burn for three hours at full power and then gradually reduce its light output to conserve what's left in the batteries.
On a liveaboard trip, I lent it one night to big Dave Knowles, one of the other passengers, to get his impressions. He told me later that it had been the brightest torch on the dive. It had a nice broad beam and its very white light made that from the other torches look yellow by comparison.
Not to be outdone, holidaying firefighter Andy Steele, like Dave from Lancashire, asked if he could try it. He later wrote me a military-style report, when I had been hoping for some George Formby vernacular along the lines of: "Ooh er, missus, it weren't 'arf bright!"
Andy, known as Steel-Eye to his friends, used it for a night-dive on the Thistlegorm wreck and reported that it was easy to switch on and off with one hand. I was reassured to hear that there was never any danger of him dropping it.
Steel-Eye may be an intrepid and courageous firefighter but he confessed that he was also reassured by the light from the X-LED because, as far as night-dives on wrecks go, he was "still a virgin".
He liked its smooth, ergonomically shaped, yet streamlined body and the defined beam with its diffused halo around it. He then went on to contradict himself slightly by saying he thought the lamp cumbersome!
It is certainly low-maintenance, in that there is infrequent reason to change the batteries. Not that it was obvious how you achieved that, as the well-finished body looked seamless.
In the event, I finally used a bit of muscle to unscrew the two sections of aluminium from each other.
Inside, the battery carriage neatly holds all eight batteries and the magnetic collar floats loose. This is a high-quality item of equipment that suited me fine.
The Seacsub X-LED costs £229.
Beaver Sports 01484 512354, www.seacsub.co.uk
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+ A lamp to take night-diving every night for a week without a second thought
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