Underwater Photography test shoot – getting a useable macro image
Canon G9 in a WP-DC21 housing.
Underwater Photography can be challenging at the best of times, but sometimes you wonder if camera manufacturers are really on your side!
The onboard flash including diffuser is next to useless for macro closer than this at 290mm from the subject.
Any closer and the long “nose” on the housing for the lens blocks any flash at the lower right and renders the 1cm close focus point useless.
Whoever designed this housing was not an underwater photographer!
I believe this is a real issue for all the housings sprouting onto the market for compact cameras that have protruding lenses.
However, with a bit of post processing work in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom you can recover some of the under exposed bottom right of the image as seen in the modified image below.
The best way to overcome this short-coming in compact camera housing design is to use an external strobe. Make sure the camera / housing combination allows flash sync for underwater photography- usually through fibre-optic sync cables now.
Brian Mayes get around this problem by modifying his housing – see his Underwater Photography article on WetPixel.
