i recently purchased an underwater housing for my throwaway camera. i know, i know, it’s not going to take beautiful pictures, nothing like what a REAL underwater housing for a REAL camera is going to produce, but i just can’t justify the cost!

but i know how much picture quality i’m going to be missing. i know that no point and shoot is going to compare to my handy 5D. i know. i know it’s going to hurt. i know that i don’t have enough light on my rig to get the best results. i know that my ghetto strobe setup is just that…ghetto. but i don’t care, it’s gonna be cool!

my throwaway camera at the moment is the fantastic fujifilm f31fd. great low light performance, smallish camera, and pretty decent picture quality. good enough for a throwaway. i use the term throwaway lightly, though, as it still is a $200+ camera. but still, for my needs, it has worked out great. it’s small enough that i could carry it around with me all the time. the low light performance is where it really shines.

i’m trying to see now if it will happily work underwater. i’ve read a little bit about it and it seems like it is capable. it doesn’t seem like the camera itself is as important as light. light appears to be the single most important aspect of underwater photography.

once you dive, you lost quality light FAST. so you need to make your own artificial light. i’m trying to figure out what the best way is to make this light. it appears that what you really need are high intensity wide beam coverage of light. i’m going to be experimenting with ways to get that to work. hopefully i’ll come up with something somewhat workable that fits in my budget. heh, i know, budget underwater photography is an oxymoron of sorts, but i’m ok with not doing it right, so long as i can do it sort of.

from what i’ve read, most people who go down the route i’m going down are unhappy with their results and end up buying quality gear. i think the thing for me is that i’m probably going to be easily pleased, so i’m really, really hoping that it won’t bother me. really.

anyway, the underwater housing that i bought from amazon was $118.95. amazon is reselling it from adorama. if you go to adorama’s site and try to purchase the same product, you will see that they sell it for $144.95! why does amazon get a price break? if anything, you would think that the amazon price would be higher than that of the adorama price! amazon also sold this housing cheaper than any other place i could find. so the moral of the story is to always check amazon.