I have just completed a week on a live-aboard dive boat, the Nekton Rorqual . This trip took us eleven miles off Cuba. I used only digital equipment for the entire trip. I shot digital video with a Sony TRV-950 in an Undersea Video housing and I shot still images with my Nikon D-100 in a Nexus housing.

After each dive, I downloaded the images from my 1gb compact flash card to my Image Tank G2 portable hard drive and then downloaded the images to my Dell laptop using an Addonics firewire card reader . The images were on two separate storage devices and I felt comfortable with this arrangement.

The best part of the digital experience was seeing the images between dives or at the end of the day. It allowed me to make changes to my exposures on subsequent dives. For subject matter, this trip was not as good as some of my Bahama trips. We were unlucky with a lot of wind, some rough seas and lots of current on our dives. This makes still photography difficult. This is not to say that the trip was bad - there were still plenty of good subjects. The highlights for me were free swimming shark suckers, moon jellyfish, Caribbean reef sharks (although I got more on video than on still) and a tiny Island Frogfish.

I only used two lenses the entire week. I used the 60mm macro lens the most. This was my favorite film lens for shooting smaller marine life. With the 1.5x multiplication factor of digital, this is now a 90mm lens and I have to get used to it. I can get closer to small subjects but I have to get farther away from some of my old favorites. I have included some samples of my photos from the trip below:

Digital Drawbacks:
Are there downsides to digital? The answer is yes. I found that my system seems to autofocus slower and when I wanted to take a photo of a moving subject, it didn't always respond as quickly as I would like. This is not a scientific conclusion. I have used an autofocus film camera for a lot of years and the digital seems slower. I know that I missed shots because of this. This was offset by the ability to shoot 103 raw files (9mb each) without having to download the images. I found that on a number of dives, I shot more than fifty pictures and on one dive, I shot the entire load of 103 images.

Workflow Tip:
I use a program named IMatch as a digital database for my files. It has a great batch renaming function. I rename my files before I process them from raw files to tiffs. By doing this, my raw file has the same name as the finished tiff and if anything should happen to the tiff file, it will be easy to find the original raw file. Here is an example of how the smart rename program works:

Starting digital file names: DSC_0589.png

I used the mask /DSC_/URC-05-/* and chose Don't change existing numbers under Sort Preset. The mask replaced every instance of DSC_ with URC-05- and the asterisk was used to keep the original file numerical values.  I have used the batch rename function in ACDSee but it will not keep the original numerical values. It uses an incremental numerical value that will increase by an number that you specify. For example, it will change DSC_0589, DSC_0591, DSC_0592, DSC_0593, and DSC_0596 to URC-05-0589, URC-05-0590, URC-05-0591, URC-05-0592, URC-05-0593 and URC-05-0594. As you can see, the numerical values do not match.

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