How to choose a never-ever beginner camera.

One of the first things you probably want to do once you're certified is to tell everyone what you've seen in the water. To do this, you probably need to know what you're looking at and this is where having a camera comes in.

1) How deep are you diving? If you're only doing shallow reef dives then almost any $100 & under snappy-happy will do. They're available from dive shops and watersport stores. If you're a real risk taker or don't care about actually getting photos at all even, get the waterproof disposables that sell for about $15. I've had photos turn out on a bright sunny day diving in 50ft crystal-clear waters from a waterproof disposable camera bought at the drugstore. National Geographic Achival quality not. It's more of a "hey my $15-disposable-piece-of-crap-camera went where your $1500+ setup did too!" :D


If you're going close to 100ft or deeper you'll need to look at the following:

2) Get a dive-specific snappy-happy that is rated for at least 200ft or more
(usually above the $150 range).

3) Make sure it has a fast shutter speed. The Ricoh that comes with the Sea & Sea housing has one of the fastest shutter speeds. This would help you actually take photos of the fish you're trying to ID rather than just a blur of yellow, a tail, a fin or nothing....:confused:

4) Make sure than camera has some sort of flash diffuser, which would be a piece of frosty plastic that goes over the flash. This will help prevent nasty burnout areas from the flash reflecting off fish scales, corals & your buddy's mask if he's in the picture too.

5) Set the camera to save the pics in jpeg format. It's the smallest file format and saves the fastest.

6) Always use fresh batteries. You don't want to be opening and closing the camera housing too often on the boat. The air is humid and the humidity will condense inside the housing when you get back underwater where it's cooler getting your camera wet & causing damage.... Same rules apply for memory cards (which is why you should use 1 large one rather than 2 smaller ones).

7) Get the biggest memory card you can afford and stick it in your camera. You don't want to be wasting your dive time previewing & deleting shots.

8) If you can, get those humidity absorbing packets from a camera shop. Put one in your camera housing, another in your flashlight (yes, humidty happens there too) and keep the rest sealed tightly away in double ziplocks for later use.

9) Go to your LDS/charter boat captain and ask to borrow his Fish ID book and ID all those fish.

Snappyhappy away and then show n' tell :) :cool:

Thanks for this information..it's exactly what I was looking for!:)

Thanks for the post - some good info there to take note of when i eventually get round to using my camera underwater.

Loved the snappy-happy phrase, never heard it before & made me LOL :D

The Olympus Stylus Tough camera series are waterproof to up to 33 feet. Now this may not seem like much but it means that if your camera enclosure starts to leak your camera is not an immediate write off and you have time either to surface or send it up your dive flag line.

That feature could have come in handy a year ago for me!

This post is old, and times have changed a bit.

I suggest you shoot in RAW rather than JPEG these days... you can change white balance easily after the fact (huge for UW), and you will have way more control over less than perfect exposure. Memory cards can handle them, these days.

I'd also make sure the camera has good high ISO performance, this is really helpful when shooting without an external strobe in less than perfect light conditions.