First Set-up

My first underwater camera configuration was dictated by the fact that I had two perfectly good, if a little old, Nikon cameras plus lenses.

I bought a Nimar housing, designed to take any 35mm camera and a Sea & Sea 50 Strobe, from Cameras Underwater at Ottery St Mary in Devon.

I was generally pleased with the results, some of which are in the Sharm el Sheikh and Maldives galleries (any with a reference number up to D67-xxx).

There were only two drawbacks with this set-up:

• to provide the level of flexibility required to cater for any 35mm camera demanded a high degree of adjustability, which in turn led to the need for a great deal of maintenance.
• the cameras are manual operation, and the size of the eyepiece coupled with the thickness of the housing concealed the meter readouts and therefore made exposures total guesswork.

The limited success I had with this set-up gave me the confidence to invest in my current kit.

Current Set-up

The benefits of this expenditure were immediately apparent. The camera is fully automatic, the eyepiece is big enough to see the full frame, even through the housing, and the Nikon flash is controlled by the camera, with the Sea & Sea 30 strobe in slave mode providing fill-in flash, almost guaranteeing perfect exposures. In detail:

• Nikon F90x Camera
• 60mm AF Micro Nikkor Lens
• 20mm AF Nikkor Lens
• Nikon Speedlight SB28
• Sea & Sea YS30 Duo Strobe
• Subal Camera Housing with Flat & Dome Ports
• Subal SB28 Housing
• Ultralight Arm (for SB28)
• Flexi Arm (for YS30 strobe)

The housings, strobe and arms all came courtesy of Steve Warren and his crew at Ocean Optics, who offer the best service you could imagine for underwater photographers of all skill / experience levels.