http://nad-lembeh.com/nights-safari-2012.html

We’ll be doing several days of cool night dives, the more the merier, send enquiries to the usual NAD-Lembeh address.

The short video shows some of the cool features of the Nauticam 7D housing when shooting video with a variety of lenses – 10.5mm, 60mm, 105mm, and Inon ‘bug eye’ lens.

Fire Urchins are possibly my favourite thing to find underwater, shooting both video and still photographs, it’s pretty hard for me to get bored of them.

These shots are from a recent trip aboard the Dive Damai Liveaboard that I led visiting Cannibal Rock in Komodo National Park, and Bima Bay in neighbouring Sumbawa.

The combination of the colours on display makes a great backdrop for photos, and to top it off, this was the first time i have seen the Zebra Crabs (Zebrida adamsii) with eggs!

In the same area we also found Coleman Shrimp (Periclimenes colemani) on the Urchins and the small commensal Squat Lobster which make their home on these colourful urchins.

Rudy from NAD-Lembeh found this shrimp at a divesite called Rojos in the Lembeh Straits.

He’s never seen it before and he’s seen most things. do you know what it is?

It was found at about 20m on a black sand slope, on a small coral outcrop.  You can clearly see the internal organs and eggs inside.

Anyway, the purpose of this post was to share a little about shooting video on the 7d in varying situations. I was using a Nauticam 7D housing and for lighting my light and motion LED’s – SunRay 2000′s.

I used a variety of lenses, my favourite combination was the Tokina 10-17mm with a 1.4 teleconverter behind it. I tried the tokina with no teleconverter and it was good, but my lights were quite wide enough to give even lighting.

The 100mm lens was tricky unless I could rest the housing on the sand or use my modified gorilla pod for additional support.

The Inon bug eye lens was acceptable but sharpness issues make it more of a gadget than a practical tool.

For settings i used a variety of ISO settings to give good depth of field on the shots. Juggling the housing to adjust white balance and iso took some getting used to, but became instinctive by the end of the trip.

I tried various combinations of buoyancy to allow for stable shooting, but sadly I didn’t achieve perfect balance. It feels steady when you’re shooting but all your body movement seem to be amplified compared to shooting a purpose built video system.

The acid test for the setup will be when i get back to lembeh next week, will I pick up the Ex-1 setup or the 7D when I want to shoot video…. More on that later!

Of course as soon as the guests had seen the Mantas i went off on a solo mission with dreams of ‘making’ (seems everyone makes pictures these days, doesnt it) a perfect Manta shot on the cleaning station without pesky bubbles in the background.

So basically i had no idea what she shot as i was on my own – when i get back to the boat she’s all gloomy saying she didnt get any good ones. Fast Forward 2 weeks and i notice she put this on her flickr

I think that’s a good effort for a first wide-angle dive! I dont know where my first wideangle slides are, but there wasnt anything as good as that in there!

I have the following available:

Nikon 10.5mm

Tokina 10-17mm

Sigma 24-70mm

Nikon 50mm 1.8

Nikon 60mm AF-D

Nikon 105mm AF-S VR

Nikon D300 (Boxed, 6xxx clicks)

Nikon D90 (Boxed, 4 months old)

Nikon SB800 flash

Please let me know if any of the above interests you.

Komodo was of course wonderful, with great Macro and Wideangle.  The Manta Dive was fantastic and with it being the 1/2 moon we had pretty simple currents.  I even saw a few sharks – which was lovely.

The South of the park was cold, dropping down to 22 degrees… Up in the North, everything was hot, too hot in fact with many corals being bleached.

Over towards Alor the bleaching was not so apparent, the highlight of the diving in this area was of course the diving in Beangabang Bay. Very cold water and strong upwellings made it a bit trickier than usual, but i still found some nice frogfish and had some lovely night dives in the coral area of the bay.  This little guy to the right was on one of the numerous pink seapens in the muck.

Click one of the thumbnails to go through to the flickr gallery. All photos were shot with a Nauticam 7D housing and Sea and Sea YS250 Stobes.

Using the custom made Nauticam 60mm port i was able to get some useable images, i actually used the lens in autofocus quite frequently, which was probably a bad idea!

In manual focus mode the Nauticam 180 degree viewfinder was fantastic, and the field of view from this micro fisheye lens is amazing, if not a little unsharp at the corners!

Now i want something that lets me upload direct to the server from my mac/ipad/blackberry, so i chose to use wordpress as it is well established.  Then for photos i think im going to use Flickr for now, and then use a desktop application to allow me to write offline when travelling and publish when i get a connection… Sounds simple, doesnt it?

Well not really, there are thousands of different options that i could chose from which has left me with a huge headache.