Herb Segars Digital Photography-Above and Below Water

Digital Photography - Above and Below Water - Page 1
To get to each section, either use the drop down above or click on the name of each section below:
Camera 1 In 2001, I decided to take the plunge into digital photography and bought a Canon A20. I enjoyed playing around with it but quickly found out that I wanted more. My wife fell in love with it immediately. She shot more photos during a week at Thanksgiving with her family than she had shot in her whole life.I found it great for family photos that would find their way to the web and the family web site. It was also good for dive related photos that would never need to be in slide form. I could squeeze out an 8" x 10" ink jet print with this 2 megapixel camera. For people who want a camera for personal use where they will use the photos for the web, send them by e-mail or make prints up to 5" x 7", a 2 megapixel camera is ideal. They are inexpensive and if you want to use one underwater, there are some very inexpensive housings. Canon has been especially good about producing an inexpensive housing. If you want to use your camera underwater, see what housings are available first, then buy the camera to suit. You can find a list of camera housings for most cameras at the digideep web site. If you want an easy to use, point and shoot digital camera, this is the type of camera that you want. Ideally, I would recommend most people to buy a digital camera that is at least 2 megapixels. Three to four megapixels is even better because you can get larger prints from the bigger files. One thing to remember when buying a digital camera is the memory card (compact flash, memory stick, secure digital card, etc.) that comes with a new camera (the digital SLR's may not come with an y) are never large enough to hold a reasonable amount of picture files. Make sure you budget money for a larger memory card. They are not terribly expensive but they should be counted in the cost of your system.	Canon A20 Our Niece - Susan Nicole Henry ©Veronica Segars
Camera 2 In late 2001, I purchased a Canon G2 - a 4 mexapixels with a swivel LCD monitor. This is a sweet camera. If I found fault with it, it was in the lens itself. I would have loved to have the capability for more lens on the long side. I should have realized before I purchased, that only a digital SLR would feed the need. Having said that, I used the heck out of the camera. It is very compact, easy to take anywhere, has great battery life and the image size was wonderful for making prints. I made a number of 11" x 17" prints that look great. My first add-on for the camera was a 1 gigabyte IBM microdrive compact flash card. I did not want to run out of photo space and I never did. At the time, I didn't do much research into digital photography (my bad) and didn't know about shooting in a raw mode. Everything was high resolution jpegs. These are not problems as long as they are resaved as Tiff files immediately and all changes are made to the tiff file rather than the jpeg. My CF (compact flash) card holds over 500 jpeg images. This was too cool! In retrospect, I think that the 1 gigabit drive is too large. I think that a couple of 256 mb or 512 mb cards would have been a better choice. If the 1 gigabit card dies, I don't have a backup and that is not a good idea. I am sure that they don't fail often but I know that when it fails, it will be at the wrong time. I did not use the camera underwater because I couldn't make up my mind whether do go with a digital SLR or stay with the G2 and get an underwater housing for it. Another reason that kept me from using the camera underwater was that my stock photo agency had not started accepting digital files and a boating magazine that I worked for did not take digital files. If I chose to put this camera underwater, there are a few housings that would work fine. I probably would chose the Ikelite housing. It is well built and reasonably priced (if I can really say that anything for underwater is reasonably priced). I added a few more accessories to this camera during late 2001 and early 2002. I bought a wide angle adapter (which required an adapter for the camera lens) and a circular polarizer for shooting near the water. My first underwater digital still experience came while using a Sony TRV-950 digital video camera with still photo capability. The image size is only 1-megapixel but it gave me a taste of digital underwater. On one day with West Indian manatees in Crystal River, Florida in January 2003, I shot an hour of video and over 200 still images without getting out of the water. That was incredible. You can see some of the stills here.	Canon G2 Eastern Box Turtle Veronica feeds seagulls
Camera 3 The winter of 2002-2003 on the east coast of the United States was a long one. I felt that it would never end. It gave me plenty of time to research digital SLR's and to bone up on the finer points of digital photography. Since I currently own Nikon equipment, I was leaning towards the D100. I also like the Fuji S2 which used Nikon lenses. My decision came down to the type of underwater housing that I would use for the camera. The only manufacturer that made a housing for the Fuji was Ikelite. I love Ikelite equipment. They are a great company and they make a great product. I really wish that their housings were not so bulky. That single factor kept me from purchasing the Fuji S2. There were more options becoming available all the time for the D100. Finally, Nexus came out with a housing for the D100. I currently own a Nexus housing for my Nikon N90 film camera and I have ports, focus gears and zoom gears which could be used with the D100 housing and camera. I also found out in early 2003, that my stock agency was accepting digital files and that the ones that I took with my D100 would work (with some upsize in Adobe Raw). The Raw file for the D100 is 17+ megabytes in size and the stock agency requires a 50 megabyte file. During the Adobe Raw conversion to Photoshop, I could choose a file size of 5120 x 3404 at 300 dpi and get the file size that I need. So, I bought the D100. One of the first things that I found out was that digital SLR photography was going to require an outlay of money for accessories. A single raw image file is 9 megabytes. So I bought a Lexar 1 gigabit CF card. A few weeks later, I bought a second card. I needed a $90.00 US ac adapter to allow me to clean my image ccd. I also needed peck pads and the cleaning solution. I bought an extra battery for the camera and a metal carrying case for the CF cards and PCMCIA adapter for my laptop. Oh yeah, I now needed my laptop or a digital wallet to hold photos while I am away. If you want to confuse yourself, check out digital forums about portable storage devices. They are an experience all in themselves. I also purchased a firewire reader for my laptop. I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 which uses an ILink firewire outlet (4-pin). I found a reader by Addonics that provides power for the reader from the laptop's USB port. This was really neat as most firewire devices need a power supply with the Dell.	Nikon D100 Groundhog taking a carrot from my wife, Veronica. This is her baby!

Digital Photography - Above and Below Water - Page 1

To get to each section, either use the drop down above or click on the name of each section below:

Camera 1

In 2001, I decided to take the plunge into digital photography and bought a Canon A20. I enjoyed playing around with it but quickly found out that I wanted more. My wife fell in love with it immediately. She shot more photos during a week at Thanksgiving with her family than she had shot in her whole life.I found it great for family photos that would find their way to the web and the family web site.

It was also good for dive related photos that would never need to be in slide form. I could squeeze out an 8" x 10" ink jet print with this 2 megapixel camera. For people who want a camera for personal use where they will use the photos for the web, send them by e-mail or make prints up to 5" x 7", a 2 megapixel camera is ideal. They are inexpensive and if you want to use one underwater, there are some very inexpensive housings. Canon has been especially good about producing an inexpensive housing. If you want to use your camera underwater, see what housings are available first, then buy the camera to suit. You can find a list of camera housings for most cameras at the digideep web site.

If you want an easy to use, point and shoot digital camera, this is the type of camera that you want. Ideally, I would recommend most people to buy a digital camera that is at least 2 megapixels. Three to four megapixels is even better because you can get larger prints from the bigger files. One thing to remember when buying a digital camera is the memory card (compact flash, memory stick, secure digital card, etc.) that comes with a new camera (the digital SLR's may not come with an y) are never large enough to hold a reasonable amount of picture files. Make sure you budget money for a larger memory card. They are not terribly expensive but they should be counted in the cost of your system.

Canon A20

Our Niece - Susan Nicole Henry

©Veronica Segars

Camera 2

In late 2001, I purchased a Canon G2 - a 4 mexapixels with a swivel LCD monitor. This is a sweet camera. If I found fault with it, it was in the lens itself. I would have loved to have the capability for more lens on the long side. I should have realized before I purchased, that only a digital SLR would feed the need.

Having said that, I used the heck out of the camera. It is very compact, easy to take anywhere, has great battery life and the image size was wonderful for making prints. I made a number of 11" x 17" prints that look great. My first add-on for the camera was a 1 gigabyte IBM microdrive compact flash card. I did not want to run out of photo space and I never did. At the time, I didn't do much research into digital photography (my bad) and didn't know about shooting in a raw mode. Everything was high resolution jpegs.

These are not problems as long as they are resaved as Tiff files immediately and all changes are made to the tiff file rather than the jpeg. My CF (compact flash) card holds over 500 jpeg images. This was too cool! In retrospect, I think that the 1 gigabit drive is too large. I think that a couple of 256 mb or 512 mb cards would have been a better choice. If the 1 gigabit card dies, I don't have a backup and that is not a good idea. I am sure that they don't fail often but I know that when it fails, it will be at the wrong time.

I did not use the camera underwater because I couldn't make up my mind whether do go with a digital SLR or stay with the G2 and get an underwater housing for it. Another reason that kept me from using the camera underwater was that my stock photo agency had not started accepting digital files and a boating magazine that I worked for did not take digital files. If I chose to put this camera underwater, there are a few housings that would work fine. I probably would chose the Ikelite housing. It is well built and reasonably priced (if I can really say that anything for underwater is reasonably priced).

I added a few more accessories to this camera during late 2001 and early 2002. I bought a wide angle adapter (which required an adapter for the camera lens) and a circular polarizer for shooting near the water.

My first underwater digital still experience came while using a Sony TRV-950 digital video camera with still photo capability. The image size is only 1-megapixel but it gave me a taste of digital underwater. On one day with West Indian manatees in Crystal River, Florida in January 2003, I shot an hour of video and over 200 still images without getting out of the water. That was incredible. You can see some of the stills here.

Canon G2

Eastern Box Turtle

Veronica feeds seagulls

Camera 3

The winter of 2002-2003 on the east coast of the United States was a long one. I felt that it would never end. It gave me plenty of time to research digital SLR's and to bone up on the finer points of digital photography. Since I currently own Nikon equipment, I was leaning towards the D100. I also like the Fuji S2 which used Nikon lenses.

My decision came down to the type of underwater housing that I would use for the camera. The only manufacturer that made a housing for the Fuji was Ikelite. I love Ikelite equipment. They are a great company and they make a great product. I really wish that their housings were not so bulky. That single factor kept me from purchasing the Fuji S2. There were more options becoming available all the time for the D100.

Finally, Nexus came out with a housing for the D100. I currently own a Nexus housing for my Nikon N90 film camera and I have ports, focus gears and zoom gears which could be used with the D100 housing and camera. I also found out in early 2003, that my stock agency was accepting digital files and that the ones that I took with my D100 would work (with some upsize in Adobe Raw). The Raw file for the D100 is 17+ megabytes in size and the stock agency requires a 50 megabyte file. During the Adobe Raw conversion to Photoshop, I could choose a file size of 5120 x 3404 at 300 dpi and get the file size that I need.

So, I bought the D100. One of the first things that I found out was that digital SLR photography was going to require an outlay of money for accessories. A single raw image file is 9 megabytes. So I bought a Lexar 1 gigabit CF card. A few weeks later, I bought a second card. I needed a $90.00 US ac adapter to allow me to clean my image ccd. I also needed peck pads and the cleaning solution. I bought an extra battery for the camera and a metal carrying case for the CF cards and PCMCIA adapter for my laptop.

Oh yeah, I now needed my laptop or a digital wallet to hold photos while I am away. If you want to confuse yourself, check out digital forums about portable storage devices. They are an experience all in themselves. I also purchased a firewire reader for my laptop. I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 which uses an ILink firewire outlet (4-pin). I found a reader by Addonics that provides power for the reader from the laptop's USB port. This was really neat as most firewire devices need a power supply with the Dell.

Nikon D100

Groundhog taking a carrot from my wife, Veronica. This is her baby!

Top of Page