DRURY S DIGITAL DIARY 4.2 FILM to DIGITAL FRED DRURY In the last column I wrote about why I think it s important for Camera Club members (especially newer and less experienced members) to participate in competition. In this column I thought I d share my motivations for switching from film to digital. As most of you are aware my photo interests have been both above and below water. Digital offers advantages in both environments, but those underwater are somewhat unique and even more compelling. Background I started making photographs in the mid 1960 s while living in Michigan s UP. My first camera was an Olympus OM-1 which is used primarily to photograph mining and quarrying operations in both the UP and the northern Lower Peninsula. I did take some nature shots when on vacation but I was not an especially serious photographer. I did my first underwater photography about 20 years later, shortly after becoming SCUBA certified and quickly became hooked. I quickly found out that underwater photography with a Nikonos V was very challenging. The Nikonos V was a rangefinder camera, meaning that you eyeballed the subject distance and set the focus distance accordingly. Preferred films were ISO 100 and the low light underwater meant that comparatively low shutter speeds and lower numbered apertures were essential. Flash was critical to getting the color in the primary subject which was usually less than 3 ft from the camera; 5 ft being about the maximum flash range underwater, even with the most powerful strobe. Whether on land or underwater, cameras and water are incompatible. Underwater cameras use O-rings to keep water where it should be; out of the camera. Getting the camera ready for its trip underwater requires attention to detail, good light and lots of practice; a human hair lying across an O-ring will pretty much guarantee flooding the camera. After entering the water with the Nikonos V the first step was to determine the overall exposure. After descending to the appropriate depth one took what was called a bluewater meter reading with the camera pointed toward the sun 1. One set the shutter speed at something like 1/30 th second, pointed the camera towards the sun and used the camera s light meter to determine the appropriate aperture. Typically this was f/5.6 or f/8; f/11 was sometimes possible on very bright days and in shallow water. The next step was to determine how close one needed to be to the foreground subject. This was controlled by the flash unit Guide Number (remember those?). The problem was that with a given aperture, say f/5.6, getting too close to the foreground subject resulted in overexposure, and too far away meant underexposure 2. The optimum distance for proper foreground exposure was the GN divided by the aperture, say (24/8 or 3 ft ). The bottom line was that the shooting parameters severely limited the possibilities. And, oh by the way, it s pretty important to make sure the flash is pointed directly at that foreground subject. 1 One typically included the sun in close-focus wide angle shots as an additional composition element. 2 The flash duration is in milliseconds, so it controls the foreground, and in the process effectively eliminates any foreground motion. The aperture and shutter speed settings control the overall (background) exposure.
When you learn SCUBA, your instructors repeatedly emphasize that the underwater environment is most definitely not normal for human beings. There are innumerable ways to get into trouble and avoiding trouble is literally critically important. So you re trained to pay attention to your surroundings and constantly monitor your dive computer which keeps track of your depth, air remaining, decompression times... all stuff that s critical to survival. The two-step exposure calculations outlined above is pretty simple stuff... at the surface. When you re underwater and trying to pay proper attention to your environment and dive computer, that simple stuff is a whole lot more challenging. I regularly taught my COD Underwater Photo students that as the water closes over one s head, one s brain turns (figuratively) turns to oatmeal!... Multitasking is really hard to do well. The next problem was getting close enough to take the shot. Wrecks are good for newbie shooters because they don t move, whereas fish do! Good UW photography required superior buoyancy control. A diver uses both a weight belt and a dive vest, aka BC which stands for buoyancy compensator. The BC as well as the regulator are both sourced from the air tank and the diver uses a valve on the BC to either add or vent air from the vest. After entering the water, a diver lets air out of their BC to achieve negative buoyancy and therefore sink. Once the desired depth is reached, they add air to the BC to stop sinking, but not too much or you ll start to rise. Complicating the picture is the fact that as one uses air from the tank the tank gets lighter, so the buoyancy dynamics are gradually changing over the course of the dive. Buoyancy control is a critical skill for an underwater photographer. Perfect buoyancy control means that one is right on the edge ; breathe in and how the air in your lungs and you ll slowly rise in the water column; breathe out and hold it and you ll slowly sink3. Over the next decade I became passionate about UW photography and, with the help and assistance of a large number of more capable photographers, I became proficient in the art4. Figure 1 shows a shot I made in 94 at a location called Cod Hole in the far northern portion of Australia s Great Barrier Reef. This image was used by the Shedd in their Wild Reef exhibit as 3 4 Figure 1 was an early success story. This is a school of Diagonally-Banded Sweetlips (Plectorhinchus lineatus). To get the shot I had to swim hard against the current to get out ahead of the fish. This breathe in or breathe out technique is important for another photo important reason. The other alternative is to kick one s fins, but this very often will churn up sand and/or silt which can ruin an otherwise great shot. For many years I had my film developed and sleeved rather than mounted. The former was cheaper and also helped me better register the sequence of shots and the mistakes I made. In the early years I was pleased when I found a roll of 36 in which there were 2 keepers.
Figure 2 shows the setup of my last film camera. The Nikonos RS was the premier underwater setup in the last years of the 20th century. For land transport the strobe arms were folded in towards the camers making the system conventient for transport. Nikon discontinued its manufacture in 2001. On land the complete setup weighed something like 50lbs but was almost weighless underwater. a background to the multiple joysticks provided for visitors answering questions about the underwater environment. By the time I made Figure 1, I had graduated from my Nikonos V rangefinder to a Nikonos RS fully featured SLR system. The system included alternate lenses (13, 50, & 80mm) as well as a 20-35mm zoom lens. It also included the SB-104 stobe system which incorporated TTL technology, was a whole lot more powerful (and much more reliable) than the old SB-105. Figure 2 shows me with the system in hand) On the other hand as my wife noted (often), the system cost us substantially more than our first house. I agreed, but have always argued that first house was very inexpensive!! For all the improvements brought by Nikon s RS system there were still significant limitations. Obviously one could not change film underwater, so you re limited to 36 shots. As a corollary, one invariably found the better photo subjects when one had run out of film or was close thereto! Another problem was that it was often impractical, or impossible, to get film (reliably) developed until you returned home. This made it hard to learn from your mistakes. Many of us countered by overshooting subjects; bracketing the subject in multiple ways to ensure one got at least one good result.
Digital Encounter Figure 3 (above) is a Commensal shrimp (Periclimenes magnificus) about 2 long feed by cleaning still smaller invertebrates from the skin and gills of fish. Figure 4 (below) is a Skeleton shrimp (Caprellidae sp.) which is a type of amphipod. They are typically about 1/2 long and live among sea grasses and small sea fans in shalloow waters. They are an important source of food for shrimp and certain species of nudibranch. My first encounter with UW digital was on a live aboard dive trip on Indonesia in 2003. The trip started (and finished) in Bali and took us east from Bali to Komodo (home of the Komodo dragons which are very large, very smelly, exceedingly ill-tempered 150 lb. plus monitor lizards which occasionally attack humans). We were on our way back to Bali and diving near Bantoh which is a village on Sangeang Island. My dive buddy was a German lady whom I d met on a previous trip, who was both a skilled diver and an avid photographer. She was using a Canon Powershot (2Mb) camera in a Canon housing. The camera which had a very small and inadequate on-board flash had been modified in Singapore to include a much more powerful underwater strobe. The strobe was connected to the camera by a fiber optic cable which mounted to the outside of the housing directly in front of the on-board strobe. When she pressed the shutter release, the camera fired the on-board stobe; the light (optical signal) from the on-board strobe was picked up by the fiber optic cable which instantly slavefired the underwater strobe. The subject of the shoot was small invertebrates (see Figure 2 and Figure 3). They are a difficult subject for several reasons; first of all they are very small so getting the strobe angle correct is difficult; second they are always in motion; and finally one needs to get very, very close without unduly alarming the subject! Trying to simultaneously accomplish all of the above is challenging to say the least. One needs to take a lot of shots to get anything worth keeping. This is when m underwater comes home to roost. You can t change film underwater; your limit is 36 exposures! And when does the most unique subject arrive on the scene; most often just after you shot your 36th exposure. Hilda on the other hand, like the Energizer bunny, just kept shooting!! And unlike
her frustrated dive buddy, she had a further advantage. She would look on the back of her camera, quickly evaluate the shot, and frequently elect to hit the Delete button and repeat the exposure. Talk about an Aha moment for her dive buddy!!! Digital Conversion A few weeks after I got back to Wheaton I called the folks at Backscatter in Monterey, California and late that year spent several very cold and rainy days in an otherwise unoccupied pool near their store shooing images of an assortment of small objects by way of learning how to use my new digital toys, which included a Nikon D100 in a Light and Motion Titan housing. I had purchased a couple of 1GB Flash Cards ($299!) which I found would deliver about 110 exposures in the D100. I figured it would be extremely unlikely I d ever need that many exposures for a single dive. However on a return trip to Indonesia in late 2004, I filled both cards on back to back dives shooting Mandarin fish near the island of Bandaneira which was the original spice island and the source of nutmeg and mace for the Dutch East Indian Company. Figure 5 shows a Mandarinfish (Synchiropus splendidus) which is a member of the Dragonet family. These brightly colored fish are typically 3-7 in length. Dragonets feed on small invertebrates found in coral; their unique mouth shape is especially adapted for this purpose. The Mandarins we found at Bandineira were considerably larger than others I had previously seen. On that trip I shot most all of my macro digitally, but continued to shoot wide angle with film. I was of the opinion that film produced and overall more pleasing and colorful result. However the complications associated with carrying both systems and their respective backup spares forced me to complete my digital conversion by the end of 2005. I ve had never been very diligent about the timely selling of surplus equipment but fortunately I did so in the case of the RS systems (I had 3 cameras; one for backup and another for spare parts). The experience taught me that advantages to digital were more than I had expected: 1. The elimination of the 36 image limit makes a huge difference. With digital, there s no limit to the number of images that can be made during a dive, and cheaper and larger flash cards are today s standard. 2. As I pointed out in the early part of this column, figuring out the correct exposure is quite an exercise underwater which makes bracketing an important subject an imperative. In some cases just shooting an entire roll on a special subject becomes necessary, just to assure that one ends up with a couple of keepers. With digital you can simple fire for effect and make improvements on the fly. Instead of it being almost impossible to get the correct exposure, the situation reverses to it being almost impossible not to find the correct exposure. The optimum procedure is to
3. 4. make an educated guess of the correct exposure, take a shot and examine the result on the camera s LCD screen5 and its histogram. Getting strobes in the precise locations is tricky underwater, especially because the water makes it difficult to identify the precise angle required. This is especially the case when one is shooting close up with macro subjects. Here again the digital fire for effect procedure makes strobe adjustment a can t-miss proposition. Underwater digital opens up a whole world of creative opportunities that simply were out-of-the-question with film. All three of these images were shot digitally at a dive site called Cannibal Rock in late 2005. Figure 6 (upper left) is a small octopus moving across the coral. Figure 7 (lower left) is a pair of Coleman Shrimp which have made their home amongst the sharp tines of a toxic sea urchin. The shrimp are about 2-3 long. Figure 8 (upper right) is an unusual example of marine symbiosis. The small Emperor Shrimp (1½ ) is riding on the back of a nudibranch. Nudibranchs are marine snails which do not have snail s characteristic protective shells. Nudibranch which are carnivores, instead protect themselves with chemical defenses which they obtain from their food source. 5 It s much easier to see the camera s LCD screen underwater. The surroundings are much darker than on the surface and there s no glare from the sun!