Tuesday, October 27, 2009

My first digital camera and underwater housings experience...


Here's the first digital cameras and underwater housings my wife, Pat, and I owned. Pat's kind of a techy gadget gal, and had picked up an Olympus 3040 and an underwater housing while I was still using my Sea and Sea MX10. She started having decent luck right off the bat diving with her camera. I was happy with the film camera at the time and had no interest in splurging on a digital camera.

During that time I was pretty much instructing or leading night dives about 6 days a week for another company and had some money coming in. I was finally getting the itch to think about a digital camera, I saw the Olympus D40 at Costco and saw how tiny it was and thought it might be a perfect little camera to carry, so I snapped it up and ordered in a housing.

Whoohoo! All set to jump into the amazing world of digital underwater photography!!!

Monday, October 26, 2009

About my "photography" past...


Way back when I was 15/16 I took a black and white photography course in high school... that was about 35 years ago, and about the only thing I remember from that course is the "rule of thirds" (if you don't know what that is, google it, there's probably lots of better explanations than I can give out there). that's about it for my formal training.

Some years ago my wife and I planned a trip to Kona and we bought a waterproof aps film camera that I think we used a couple times snorkeling... it went bye bye for 4-5 bucks in a garage sale a couple years ago I think. It was that trip that I finally (literally one of my first memories in life was a neighborhood kid in Columbus, Ohio -where I moved from at the age of 2 and a half- standing in a wading pool in a "frogman" suit - I wanted to be a "frogman" ever since) got scuba certified . After getting scuba certified in Kona, we went back to Corvallis, Oregon to dive in the fun waters off the Oregon coast. We ended up picking up a Sea and Sea MX10 film camera, which was a nice and relatively easy to use camera in it's own right... that also went bye bye in the garage sale.

I quickly learned something about film cameras underwater.... if you really have no clue what you're doing, you can waste an entire roll of film REAL FAST. Once you start to figure things out, at least a the level I was able to figure out what I was doing, you can actually get maybe a couple pictures you like out of a roll of film (note: odds are if you stick with the photography thing you'll probably look back at your early pictures and think less of them than you did at the time).

After moving to Kona Hawaii, I used that MX10 for a year or two. One day we were at Costco and they had a 4 megapixel Olympus for sale for $400 or so and I figured I had to try it... I ordered a housing for it via mail order and from there started my journey....

Aloha,

Steve

Aloha, I'm Steve, a Kona Hawaii scuba diver. This is my attempt at a blog on using digital cameras and housings while scuba diving.



Aloha!!! Welcome to post number one of my new blog. I have an existing blog - http://www.kona-scuba-diving.blogspot.com - that I've been posting on for four years now. It covers Kona, scuba diving in Kona, my various adventures here an elsewhere and a bunch of blabber.... I'm going to try to keep this blog primarily related to photography (good luck with that, I tend to lose focus on occasion), more specifically related to photography underwater from a hobbyist view.