SpAtZ said:
Also, What should I use for underwater?
A) What's your budget?
B) Are you looking for a camera for UW scuba, or for UW snorkel?
FWIW, on my Galapagos trip, I did 2 weeks. The first week was the standard tourist "island visit" itinerary, and the 2nd week was onboard one of the dedicated Scuba liveaboards that goes all the way out to Wolf and Darwin. As such, in addition to a land camera SLR system, I also had my (35mm) UW Photo Nikonos V system too. Here's a photo of my Nikonos V system, to give you an idea of its size:
Note the two big, bulky, heavy (and expensive) strobes.
Overall, this not a system to go snorkel with, so what I did for snorkeling was to ditch the strobes. Keeping just the Nikonos V body with with my 15mm WA lens and viewfinder, its a compact (albeit heavy) system.
With the 15mm WA lens, when set it to f/8 and a ~2ft focus distance provides a DOF from 1ft to Infinity...this makes things easy when breath-holding
The electronics figured out the shutter duration; with ISO 100 film, it was typically around 1/45sec at snorkeling depths, and partly because there's no autofocus sytem, it has effectively no shutter lag.
To put any SLR into a waterproof housing is expensive. The
least expensive housing manufacturer is Ikelite...the strobes on my Nikonos system are Ikelite SS-200's.
Here's their webpage on their 20D housing.. Also note that it alone eats up 8lbs of your baggage allowance.
As per B&H, this housing's a bit over $1200, plus you'll need to add to that at least one "lens port" (no, they're not included), which will set you back another $100-$400, depending on the lens you want to use. You now have a 20D for snorkeling and have only spent $1400 or so, in addition to the camera and lens. Now you know why my first question was budget.
To upgrade this to use it for deeper than snorkeling depths, you'll need to add lighting; figure another $900 for a single Ikelite DS-125 strobe w/cord & arm, or double that for dual strobes. BTW, my SS-200 strobes aren't digital compatible, so now you know why I'm still using my Nikonos.
Overall, I think the frugal alternative for a waterproof snorkeling digital system is to put a housing around a point-n-shoot. Canon makes them for several of their P&S cameras, and they sell for under $200 complete. I recently did this for a Canon A80, but have less than an hour in the water with it...what I found is that it can have *horrendous* shutter lag because you can be "sloshing around" and changing your distance to subject, which really messes up its attempts to auto-focus.
What I've not yet found firsthand on this particular system is how bad its backscatter is going to be.
For all photography, think about the path that light from a strobe has to take: it goes from the strobe head outwards to the subject, bounces off the subject, and then back to the lens.
What this means is that anything along that path will be illuminated, and for land photography, we usually don't think too much about this because air is clear. But water often has "stuff" floating in it. Here's an example:
A technique to minimize this backscatter problem is, in simplest terms, to not illuminate the water between your strobe and your subject. What is done is to move your strobes away from your camera lens, so as to change the "light path" geometry and thus, the light comes in more from the side to the subject, instead of from effectively the lens...to get really fussy about this, you don't want to illuminate "your side" of the particles in the water, because that's what turns them white. That's why my camera system (at top) has those octopus arms on it. The problem with a housed P&S camera is that they can't move their built-in strobe...at best, they have a piece of plastic that will block it off. This is a system limitation with housed P&S's and merely something to be aware of when taking your UW photos.
-hh