“Preferably don’t touch anything,” said Lim. “But if you have to stabilise yourself for a shot, use one or at most two fingers on rocks, NOT corals.”

“Fool it into thinking that you’re a big, slow fish,” she quipped. “If I see a batfish, I will signal you guys: WAIT. The batfish will come and play with your bubbles.”

An old problem with digital cameras is that of shutter release lag times; that infuriating delay when it seems (to a film camera devotee) to take forever for the camera to catch the image after pressing the button.

In this aspect, the two cameras, with their short lag times (0.3 sec and 0.4 sec for the C-8080 and C-5060 respectively) made it easier for this writer to catch Nemos (clown fish) darting about sea anemones.

“After taking the shot, just take a deep breath and slowly float up without damaging the coral,” advised Lim.

“For example, if you want to take pictures of sea horses and ghost pipe fish, you have to look amidst sea grass,” noted Lim.

Sea cucumbers bury themselves in the sand and only emerge at night. Flounders and rays are found on sandy seabeds while some nudibranchs are associated with particular soft corals.

“The flabellina nudibranch feed on hydroids to get its stinging cells,” related Lim. “So when you see hydroids, get your camera ready for flabellinas as well as sea spiders and sea crabs.”

The camera part of it

However, the built-in flash can be used for closer shots as there are not that many particles (as the light travels only a short distance through the water). Another way to avoid backscatter is to use an external strobe light (attached about half a metre away from the camera) since the light won’t reflect so harshly directly back into the lens.

This writer found that the two cameras’ reasonably large apertures (f2.4-3.5 for the 28-140mm range of the C-8080 and f2.8-4.8 for the 27-110mm range of the C-5060) made it OK for shooting in most circumstances when the sun came out. But in October, the monsoon-imminent skies above Redang were frequently overcast and flash had to be used especially when we went in deeper.

Know your underwater camera well and it will bring you tremendous pleasure, like these pictures (above, and below) of sea creatures.

Camera care

The most tedious part of scuba photography is before the dive. Lim recommended setting aside at least an hour before to prepare the camera.

For me, the process was like a surgical operation. First, we washed our hands and wiped them on a special lint-free cloth. Then we lifted the O-ring off the casing with a special plastic scooper before thoroughly inspecting the groove (where the O-ring was) with a torchlight to check for the finest piece of sand, hair or even lint.

“With the pressure underwater, even the smallest piece of lint can cause the casing to leak,” said Lim.

Then a special grease has to be smeared thinly and evenly on the O ring itself. And we couldn’t pull the ring too hard for fear of distorting its natural shape and . . . you guessed it . . . end up with seawater dripping onto the precious cameras.

White balance

The deeper one dives, the bluer the water appears. This is because the red part of the light spectrum is easily diffused in shallower waters and fails to penetrate deeper.

Digital cameras normally have something called “white balance” which adjusts pictures back to the “correct” colours. However, according to Lim, since the special lighting conditions underwater are not the same as on land, a camera’s automatic white balancing capabilities may sometimes be overwhelmed.

The way to overcome this is to do manual white balancing. Point the camera onto something white or grey (such as a special plastic slate that divers use to write underwater), make sure it covers the whole viewfinder and press the button.

“Preferably, do manual white balancing every two metres of depth,” said Lim.

However, this was easier said than done. It required some finger acrobatics to hold onto the large casing of the C-8080 and stretch my thumb back to the d*** white balance button on the back while my other hand held onto the slate. With everything tensed up, I then had to determine whether the slate covered the whole view. One way to overcome this is to use white or grey fins so that one can have both hands on the camera.

Or else, just use the auto white balance and do colour corrections on the computer later. In such a case, use the daylight mode (of white balance) for shallow waters (up to 10m) or for flash-assisted macro shots. For deeper waters, switch to cloudy mode to tone down the blue. W

So are you ready for underwater digital photography? Well, after your next dive, just hook the camera up to your laptop and let all your dive buddies see the splendours (or horrors) of what you’ve taken!