Accessories for UW Housings

There is a variety of accessories for digital underwater housings. The most important purchase after getting the camera and housing (along with an assortment of memory cards, batteries) is a strobe. There main difference between a land strobe and a

Also, underwater, most people like to go wide. The consumer digital cameras have a 35mm equivalent lens of 35 mm, so if you like those CFWA (close focus wide angle) shots, you'll need a different lens. Some housings accept add on lenses directly, others need an adapter which screws onto the lens ring of the housing.

Underwater Strobes

There are curently only a few manufacturers producing strobes for digital underwater photography. Ikelite, Inon, Sea and Sea, Epoque, UN Corporation are some of the makers of strobes.

Ike has made a good information page that is constantly going revision regarding the use of strobes with underwater digital camera housings. There is also information regarding the TTL slave sensors for use with the underwater strobes. These are similar to the one used by Inon. Ikelite has released their new DS-50 strobe (the model number 50 stands for 50 watt seconds) which is available as a package with the TTL sensor. Also, they have introduced the DS-125 strobe which is newly designed for digital camera use, rather than modifying an existing strobe with circuitry for digital photography.

Sea and Sea makes the YS-90DX, an underwater strobe with dedicated optic fiber cable which is positioned to "see" the output from the camera's flash. Epoque has a strobe that connects with optical fiber cable, similar to U.N. Corporation's SF-128 strobe (no web page).

Add On Lenses

The pioneer in this field was Inon, who came out with a lens roughly the equivalent of a 15mm Nikonos lens. Wide Conversion Lens UWL-100 makes the field of view 91.4 degrees underwater and 145 degrees on land (fisheye). It changes the minimum focus distance from 0.8 to 0.23 meters.

The Close Up Lens UCL-330, is a conversion lens which allows photography to within 1 cm of the subject.

Olympus, Epoque and Sea & Sea also offer similar lenses.

Underwater Lights

Sony was one of the first manufacturers to offer an underwater light with a handle attaching to the marine case. Other manufacturers such as Epoque and Sea & Sea offer these types of lights.

I have done some experimenting with a cannister light, a 14 amp Halogen 50W light (Halcyon) but with a Goodman style handle (used for cave diving). I will follow up using the new Helios NiMh battery light with a 10W HID head and a custom made bracket.

Other Camera Accessories

There are a bunch more accessories available, such as Pelican cases for transporting your camera, housing, and other gear. Don't forget the spare O-ring and grease, along with lint free cloths such as Kimwipes for cleaning out O-ring grooves, etc.

An AC adapter is a good accessory to have so that you don't drain the batteries when using the LCD screen intensive tasks such as viewing the photos. We use a TV monitor and hook up the camera after dives to review the photos as well as do fish ID.

For the Olympus cameras, the C-7AU 110V/120V (or C-6AE Foreign 220V) AC Adapter which is essential for when you are downloading pictures to your computer or displaying photos on a TV screen. A much cheaper alternative is the DigiPower Solutions AC Power Adapter for Olympus Cameras, Outpost Product No. 51964. The benefit of this is that it runs on 100-240V input, having an autoswitching 110/220V power with a 6.5V-2500mA output. You can find this item at outpost.com at a much lower price than the Olympus product.

Also, the best way to transfer images is by using a Smartmedia cardreader instead of hooking the camera up to the computer via a USB cable. My favorite is the Microtech because it can read both Smartmedia and CompactFlash.

Updated: February 8, 2003