Inon Underwater Photography Day at Mike's Dive Store London! Saturday the 7th of December

Come and Learn About Underwater Camera Equipment And Winning Underwater Photography Techniques

Mike’s Dive Store is the only official INON UK Underwater Photography Academy and INON UK underwater camera retailer in London.  Mike’s Dive Store already has two experienced underwater photographers on the staff.  Christian Deakin is an INON UK Level One underwater photography instructor and Joe T Bourne is also an accomplished underwater image-maker.   Mike’s has long specialised in underwater camera equipment. In the run up to Christmas Mike’s Dive Store will have a special open day where you can learn from INON UK experts about choosing and using underwater cameras and accessories to help you get batter pictures you can be proud of.

On Saturday December 7th Mike’s will have in - store presentations from INON UK’s founders Lisa Collins and Steve Warren. There will also be lots of INON underwater camera equipment to look at from strobes to video lights to lenses and stacks of accessories. Along with specialist one to one advice across the counters from Lisa and Steve and some very special promotional deals, there are also talks to help explain the ins and outs of choosing underwater camera equipment that will be especially helpful if you are new to underwater photography.

The three talks are about selecting underwater strobes and video lights, choosing lenses and winning composition skills.

Selecting Underwater Strobes and Video Lights

For many types of underwater photography using additional lighting is a must. It’s used to light up subjects at night, in caverns and wrecks or under overhangs. It is used creatively to emphasise textures or add points of interest. And, most of all, it is used to put vibrant colours back into your underwater pictures. But there are so many underwater strobes to choose from with lots of often confusing features, making a choice can seem very complicated. Which features and benefits are going to be important to you? Would you be better off with a video light instead? How do you even aim it properly to prevent backscatter? Do you actually need two lights?

Steve Warren is both a stills photographer and sometime professional cameraman. Just back from lighting a complicated night sequence for TV, he can explain the desirable features to look for in strobes and video lights and give you the knowledge to make informed choices about which lighting is best for you.

Choosing Lenses

The wealth of subjects we see underwater range from the largest whales to the tiniest crustaceans. Visibility may stretch to over 60m, but can be barely centimetres.  It is asking a lot – too much in fact – for any camera to capture all that we experience on our dives and would wish to share with others. The solution is to choose accessory lenses that best match our subjects and likely visibility. Compact camera users and some mirrorless camera owners enjoy the huge benefits of being able to use wet lenses – like INON’s range – which can be changed underwater. This lets you react to whatever you see and be opportunistic and provides the flexibility to photograph a wreck vista one moment and a frame filling photograph of a tiny nudibranch on its deck seconds later.

In this talk, Steve will explain the roles different lenses play for different types of subjects. He’ll also cut through some of the jargon and misinformation that surrounds this subject and leads people to make expensive buying mistakes, which lead to disappointing images.

Winning Compositions

Owning the best equipment and diving the best photo destinations won’t help you make great pictures if you don’t follow a few simple rules of composition. Learning to see a picture is a skill anyone can acquire. But, for underwater photographers, this is the subject many underwater photography instructors avoid! So it is hard to learn this essential skills set from others. For Lisa Collins, shooting winning compositions is all part of her job. As a photo – journalist shooting  main features for Diver Magazine she has to be able to arrive at a destination she’s never been to before and shoot images that not only reveal the signature species and locations of that location, but look great to.

In this presentation Lisa will share with you the rules that will help you make great photographs on your next dive trip. She’ll discuss what makes a good subject, how to frame it for best effect, the importance of using complimentary colours and the creative thinking that goes into making each photograph in her magazine submissions.

Come along on Sat the 7th of Dec to answer all those questions you have been accumulating over the years! And maybe even to buy something either for your buddy or perhaps an early Christmas present for yourself!!

Dive Computers with Air Transmitters

Gas-Integrated Dive Computer Transmitters

Let’s admit it. We divers are a funny lot. Although we are often seen by others as being very adventurous in what we do, we are usually very unadventurous in the way we do it and that is especially true when it comes to equipment innovation.

Back in the early ’70s, divers used tanks with J-valves. When the air in the tank was depleted, the regulator became harder to breathe from. The diver then pulled the J-valve release, which allowed access to the last quarter of the tank’s supply, the regulator freed up and it was time to ascend. It sounds a bit primitive doesn’t it? Can you believe that when submersible pressure gauges (SPGs) were first introduced they were met with some resistance?

Some divers saw them as an additional hazard, an additional failure point. They thought they could easily explode with so much pressure inside them and a legacy of that is seen today when trainee divers are still taught to hold the gauge away when they first turn a tank on. I haven’t ever heard of a pressure gauge so exploding but I’m sure it must have happened – once!

Air-integrated computers have been with us for some time. They were resisted as well at first. Myths and misinformation grew up surrounding them. Because they made a prognosis of remaining air-time based on a previous breathing rate and the actual depth the diver is at, many who should have known better declared that they preferred to know the remaining pressure in their tank, as if that information was not available as well.

I would say that we all understand the concept of remaining air-time in minutes balanced against the total ascent time required (hopefully the former is always greater than the latter) rather than some pressure reading but it took time for this advance to become accepted. It was caused by a general distrust in technology. That’s ironic when we trust technology so much in so many other different ways – as aeroplane passengers, for example.

Of course there were some defects in gas-integrating transmitters when they were initially invented, notably an occasional loss of pairing between transmitter and wrist unit. Today’s computers pair permanently with their wrist units so the case of failing to get a tank reading under water with one that needed to be paired immediately before diving has faded into the past. There was also talk of photographer’s underwater strobe units interfering with the signal. I’ve never encountered that and I’ve used a lot of different strobe units as well as a lot of different computers.

Redundancy

Bantin's Blog - Redundancy

My daughter-in-law used a courtesy car from her garage while hers was being worked on. It was a new Merceded C180, a very nice car. That is until she drove over a bottle and wrecked a tyre. Luckily, although she was 70 miles from home, she was only 70 metres from my house, so I took care of things while she went on to her job at the nearby film studios.

All I had to do was to remove the wheel and take it to a tyre dealer for a replacement. It was at this point I discovered that the car had neither a spare wheel nor a jack. So much for advances in modern technology. I had to wait all day for a rescue service to take the car to a garage. Luckily this all didn't happen somewhere remote.

This happily brings us to the subject of redundancy. When you are only 20 metres under water, you are a long way from 'home'. It's not a place to find that you need a 'spare' that you don't have and unless your buddy is actually holding your hand, the spare carried there might be well beyond reach.

So what are the spares you should carry? 

Firstly, let's think about spares that could save a dive before you even get in the water. A spare mask strap and a spare fin strap in your bag could save the frustration of finding the first one break just as you put your mask or fins on. A spare regulator in your bag can save the day if you're diving far from home. These things never fail when they are sitting in a cupboard. It's worth carrying a spare dive mask too, if you're travelling and deep divers take a spare mask with them to avoid disaster under water. Every diver should be competent enough to handle a broken strap while diving and you'll soon discover a mask will work without one if you need to.

A couple of spare tank O-rings (DIN or A-clamp) are always worth having too.

So what are the spares you should carry under water?

If you were working professionally as a diving instructor might, the HSE demands that you carry an independent air supply. That makes sense. If you are diving in the poorer visibility we encounter in home waters, it make sense for every diver to carry spare gas so why not invest in a pony cylinder (a smaller cylinder that you wear alongside the main) complete with its own regulator, or even simply twin two standard cylinders? Just be sure they are not too heavy together for you to handle.

BCs are very low-tech affairs but if you are wearing a drysuit and not over-weighted, that will give you the redundancy you need for cold water diving. If you are warm water diving and not over-weighted, you should always be able to swim up easily, even if your BC were to suffer a rare failure.

I've already mentioned in a previous blog about having two dive computers on dives. If one should fail (and everything fails at some time or other) you will need to wait 24 hours before continuing to dive and if you're away on an expensive diving trip, you won't be happy doing that. 

Dive Torches are much more reliable than they used to be but people are just as bad as ever so there's always the chance that you forgot to fully charge yours or even didn't reassemble it faultlessly afterwards. It's not very nice to be left in the dark. The simple solution is to carry a back up in the pocket of your BC and small inexpensive dive torches can have big performances nowadays.

Happy diving. - John Bantin

Electronics and Dive Computers - John Bantin

Electronics

The big expensive outboard motor of my boat was very sophisticated but for some unknown reason one day it simply stopped working. Three different mechanics came to look at it consecutively, one Spanish, one German and one British. In consequence I learned the term 'black box' in three different languages. The electronics were replaced and everything was fine. Many of us have experienced similar failures of electronics in our cars. 

PCBs are mainly now sourced in the Far East. They are remarkably cheap. 

It's almost impossible to buy electronic goods these days without a PCB in it. Even modern toasters have them. What electronics do we use in diving? Our diving computers.

When these were first introduced in the early 1980s, they were made in Switzerland and would have cost around £3000 each at today's prices. They were certainly a luxury item. Today we can buy a diving computer for a few hundred pounds.

They are incredibly useful items and can be credited for the millions of man-dives made without any accident due to decompression illness. Of course, no manufacturer can guarantee that you personally will be always safe even if you manage your dive perfectly the way the computer demands but that's because the dive computer was not made for you exclusively. Everyone is physiologically different so the manufacturers try to build in an element of safety to their mathematical calculations to account for that - but you might be one of the very few outside those parameters. Nobody knows.

That said, diving computers are fantastic tools for leisure divers and I thoroughly recommend that every diver have one - or at least one. The problem arises when the black box strapped on your arm ceases to work. It could be battery failure or it could be worse.

You don't expect your toaster to last forever so why would you computer? You may say that your computer gets less use but remember that for every dive you do it continues to recalculate during your surface interval so that if you did 100 dives in a year it would almost be the equivalent of your computer working for 100 days.

PCBs are cheap. The major cost of a diving computer is in the research and development. Manufacturers want you to be a happy customer. They back up their warranties by simply replacing the unit from stock although some say they will try to repair if they can. It all depends on the resources of the company in the country you are in. In Britain, there are few actual manufacturers although one importer is the wholly owned subsidiary of its principal and has the resources to match.

So what am I saying? Buy a dive computer, understand what it does and use it for your dives. Appreciate the good value it represents and be happy to get some good years out of it. Be also aware that computer technology moves on apace. For example, computers that were oil-filled to keep them watertight cost a fortune to make and the same thing applied when it comes to changing the battery. They are no longer made. 

Your dive computer could be considered in the same way as that single electronic component in your car. If it stops working, you replace it. This blog was inspired by a letter I read from someone in America who complained that the very inexpensive computer watch he bought seven years ago had ceased to work and was no longer repairable under warranty. That's the way of the world.

By the way, reading the instruction book while decompressing is not a good way to use your dive computer. Safe diving - John Bantin