Small fish, big pond

Small fish, big pond
Originally uploaded by altsaint.

It is beyond the Big Blue to understand the neglect it must feel right now. Dusted off after months of lying on the shelf. Competitions have come and gone, freediving records set, and other tid-bits of freediving trivia all left lying by the wayside. Unfortunately the author has been away, then on his return spent rather a lot of time photo and video editing. Probably too much. ( Well, definitely too much spent on the highly-addictive flickr site).

Even now I am only making a placeholder - a promise of things to come, once the season gets into full swing. In the meantime I am making emergency use of this journal, for the purposes I originally set it up; to record training and photographic knowledge for future reference. This entry falls firmly into the category of 'underwater photography'. On our trip to Kenya a few weeks ago, my underwater rig hit it's most problematic patch ever. Shutter locking up and strobe refusing to fire being frequent offenders. To my surprise triumph over adversity came into play, and I actually recorded one or two reasonable shots. The misfiring strobe was a worsening issue though, and needed sorting.

So on the hottest day to-date, of 2008, I took myself off to those nice people at Cameras Underwater, next to Embankment Station. Within minutes, the culprit was identified as the flash sync cable. Forty quid to replace that didn't hurt quite as much as a new strobe would have done. Discussion then turned to upgrade, as the back of my mind has been housing the thought of submerging an EOS400D at some stage. Out popped a book of underwater images, all taken with a recent compact digital ( and most without strobe ). The difference in quality between those images and the equivalent on SLR, I really don't think would have been appreciable. Recent compacts have superior lenses, reduced shutter lag, and nice big LCD screens. As long as you have the option to manually set the white balance, then you can think about putting it into a housing. I don't know why I have overlooked this in the past. My expensive set of filters not only reduce the light hitting the chip, but they are only effective at quite shallow depths. Seasoned pro's like Matt Kitchen have been advocating MWB on video for some time, but I suppose I'd assumed it would be fiddly for stills and not worth the effort. All the while having to do fiddly edits in Photoshop trying to correct the cyan colour cast.

The second part of the magic recipe, is to attach a decent wet-mount wide-angle lens. Now this I know will not work with my trusty Olys, as the built-in lens is too wide itself, and vignetting / distortion becomes a problem. But at least I now have a 2 stage plan - try out MWB on the existing rig, and make sure I'm happy with the replaced fibre-optic cable. As a slot-in upgrade in a year or so, see what latest compacts are on the market, and add one of these plus housing to my strobe / arm assembly. Oh yes, and make an investment in a decent WA lens. It's the way forward, I'm sure.

Next month, expect the usual mix of freediving news and gossip. In particular, there should be some news about Harry Houdini. Stay tuned.