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My Equipment
My first underwater camera was a Nikonos III,
bought in 1980 on a business trip to Hong Kong. I soon upgraded
to a Nikonos V to get the benefits of aperture priority and the
wider choice of camera settings offered.
Almost immediately I started to customise my
kit with a series of add-on close-up lenses and framers, all interchangeable
underwater. This was followed by customised base trays, with additional
handles and a quick release for my strobe arm, adding ease of
use both in, and out of the water.
My move to a housed SLR camera was prompted by
the introduction of low cost housings, in the wake of the introduction
of the Nikon RS, a beautiful, but expensive, underwater camera
to replace the Nikonos series.
My choice was the ‘new’ Subal housing
for the Nikon 801S which I used for all my underwater pictures
for the next 8 years. Seeing my subject and image composition,
through the lens, increased my acceptable images per roll by more
than 40%
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In 2003, I finally succumbed
to the inevitable and upgraded to the 'digital world’
with a Fuji S2pro SLR in a Sea & Sea housing. This gives
me TTL and digital flash systems. I also have two Inon digital
strobes, which have a TTL facility and eleven digital settings.
For me, TTL was an important feature because my own custom
designed Ring Flash is TTL only.
Custom designed 'bendy arms' have always
been, and still are, my favourite mounting for my strobes.
Exhaustive tests on different types of strobe arms convinced
me of the versatility, and ease of use, of the 'bendy arm'
in all lighting situations.
With a digital camera system comes a whole
new set of kit which includes on-location and travel digital
storage, plus a computer to process and archive images for
long-term storage once they are safely home. |
Once home there are many
back-up options available. My personal choices are dual
hard drives and DVD copies.
Experience has proved that you need more
than one travel storage device - just in case! A FlashTrax
or Epson 2000 are useful pieces of kit as they are small,
available up to 80GB and have an LCD screen so you can verify
that you have transferred your images correctly. If you
want to carry a laptop then fine, but you can get smaller,
cheaper devices for burning your images on to CDs or DVDs
as further field back-up. If you take some priceless images
on location, don't re-use that flash card until you get
home, a good reason to carry a few spares. |
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Take a look at some of the custom built equipment
we have designed and built which is still available today.
click here >>>
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Copyright
© Ken Sullivan All Rights reserved