The Heartbreak Of Underwater Photography

I had a dream last night that my camera flooded. I can still see it, awash inside the housing while the water level, visible through the port, gurgled ever higher. Unfortunately for me, this is a recurring dream, like the ones we have as kids where we get to school and realize that we somehow forgot to put on pants before leaving the house. And like those dreams, it feels so good to wake up and realize that everything’s okay.

Of course, everything isn’t always okay. Sometimes those floods are all too real. Back in the days of film, I used to flood cameras on a regular basis. I didn’t worry about them because those cameras weren’t overly expensive and replacing them was simply the cost of doing business.

Even still, I’d warn my friends against ever bringing a camera underwater. The list of things that could go wrong, and that you wouldn’t know about until too late, was excruciatingly long. I used to call it, “the heartbreak of underwater photography.” The film didn’t always advance between shots; strobes sometimes didn’t fire (sometimes they didn’t even get turned on); exposure settings could be way off; distance settings would get accidentally changed; et cetera, et cetera. And when you did get a good shot, so much time passed before you saw it that it was hard to remember what you had done right to then do it again.



All that’s in the past now, though, and it’s hard to even remember those bad old days. I’m continually blown away by the quality of images and video that people are able to capture using small, inexpensive cameras. It’s never been easier to re-live a dive, to share it with friends, or to try to figure out what the heck you were looking at, than it is today. And those floods – well, when the camera’s expensive enough, that’s what insurance is for. But these days, if you’re going underwater without a camera, the only question is – why.