Camera Strobes

Our protocol for scuba diving with cowsharks

Shark Alley is a special and unusual dive site just south of Millers Point. It is an aggregation site for broadnose sevengill cowsharks, predators who feed on seals and a variety of other animals. They can grow to three metres in length. These sharks seem to use this site as a resting area (though we aren’t sure – research is ongoing) and their behaviour is typically docile and relaxed. For this reason it is a great place to dive, as the sharks come close enough to get a good look at them but do not behave in a threatening manner.

There has never been a serious incident involving a diver and a shark at this site, but there have been a few incidents. Clare has had her pillar valve gnawed on by a feisty young male shark while on a dive here a few years back, and early in May a diver was bitten on the arm by one of the sharks. That latter bite made the newspaper (the shark drew blood and the NSRI was summoned), but I am sure that there have been other more minor incidents here that didn’t get reported.

This got me thinking about a protocol for diving with these animals. Shark dives all over the world are governed by safety protocols and guidelines, usually put in place by dive operators themselves (examples here and here). We do have a set of standards that we adhere to when visiting this site and mention in dive briefings, but I’ve never written them down all together before. I am a firm believer in self regulation, whereby the industry regulates itself so that we don’t end up with a bureaucrat in an office telling us we can’t dive with cowsharks without (for example) a special permit, or (heaven forbid) ever again!

So here’s our protocol – how we choose to regulate ourselves when diving this site. It’s not a set of hard and fast rules that everyone has to follow, but it’s how we choose to approach dives at Shark Alley, a little bit like Underwater Africa’s diver code of conduct, but for cowshark diving. You are welcome to use these principles yourself, and I’d like to hear any suggestions you have to improve them or for points I may not have thought of.

Do a positive entry (i.e. with your BCD fully inflated) if you are diving off the boat, so you do not risk landing on a shark in mid water. If there is a thermocline, the sharks typically swim above it, and may be shallower than you expect.
Descend slowly in a controlled manner, looking below you at all times. Ensure that you are carrying sufficient weight (you should be able to kneel on the sand if necessary).
Do not make any physical contact with the sharks. Do not try and stroke them as they swim by, and do not hang on their tails or dorsal fins.
Do not feed the sharks. Don’t carry anything edible (sardines, for example) in your BCD, and do not chum from the boat. This includes washing the deck off at the dive site if you’ve just been fishing or on a baited shark dive. Chumming is both illegal (you need a permit) and unsafe, especially if there are divers in the water.
If you have students in the water, perform skills away from the sharks (if possible, avoid conducting skills at this site).
Some sharks will show a keen interest in your camera and flash or strobes. Do not antagonise them by putting a camera directly in their face. If a shark is showing undue interest in your photographic equipment, hold off taking pictures for a moment while it swims away.
Move out of the sharks’ way if they swim towards you. (Here’s a video of Tami doing just that.) Cowsharks are confident and curious, and often won’t give way to divers. Respect their space and move far enough away that they won’t rub against you or bump you as they swim by.
Be alert for any strange behaviour by an individual shark or the sharks around you. Be aware of your surroundings and don’t become absorbed with fiddling with your camera or gear. If a shark does become overly familiar (bumping or biting), gather the divers together in a close group and abort the dive in a controlled manner.
Do not dive at this site at night or in low light. This is probably when cowsharks feed (though we aren’t sure), and as ambush predators their behaviour is likely to be quite different in dark water when they’re in hunting mode.
Do not dive at this site alone. When diving in a group, stay with the group and close to your buddy.

I am not writing this protocol down to make people afraid of diving with cowsharks in Cape Town. But I do think it’s important to remember that this is a dive that needs to be taken seriously, with safety as a priority. Because we can visit this site whenever we want to, it’s tempting to become blasé about what an amazing experience it is, and also about the fact that these are sharks that need to be respected.

In conclusion! Unlike great white sharks, cowsharks (and blue sharks, and mako sharks, and and and…) are not protected in South Africa, so it’s not illegal to fish for them in permitted fishing areas (i.e. outside no take zones, etc). One of the cage diving operators in Gansbaai even used to use cowshark livers in his chum… If you want to make a difference in the lives of cowsharks and ensure they’re still here for us to dive with in future decades, consider writing a letter to the relevant government minister (make sure it’s the current one, in the new cabinet) and also to the shadow minister from the opposition party, requesting protection for more shark species in South African waters.

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New camera & underwater housing: Sony RX100

My Sony DSC-TX5 has served me remarkably well, but after three years I was starting to itch for something with a bit more scope for manual control. The TX5 has an underwater mode: you switch it on, turn on the flash, and you’re good to go. It also has a rugged Sony-built housing that is almost neutrally buoyant with the camera inside, can be held and operated with one hand, and supports the addition of an external strobe (which I did). All these things make it incredibly user friendly and eminently suitable for a busy diver who might be doing other things (like grabbing onto other divers who are being wayward, or being a good buddy) and need both hands now and then.

I did a lot of reading and asking, and ended up settling on another Sony camera (my third, and the fourth for our family), the Sony DSC-RX100. It’s a tiny, pocket-sized camera that has many manual control options (aperture and shutter priority modes, manual and program mode, and some built in automatic modes) but isn’t a DSLR. It has received the most effusive reviews that I’ve ever read for an electronic device. Here’s Wired, and here’s the New York Times. Digital Photography Review also said nice things. It has a giant 20.2 megapixel sensor and a fast Carl Zeiss lens capable of a magnificent 3.6x zoom. You can read up about those things elsewhere. It takes HD video, and you can shoot stills at the same time. What sold me on the camera was its reported excellent performance in low light environments (a feature of several of the Sony models I’ve owned), which I figured would make it excellent for Cape Town diving.

There are a couple of options for an underwater housing for the DSC-RX100, but unfortunately nothing made by Sony. I settled on the Ikelite housing because there’s a local Ikelite presence, and because it wasn’t insanely expensive. The housing unfortunately has the hydrodynamics of a house brick and mine needed its clips replaced after less than thirty dives, but the camera is nice enough that I was willing to put up with having a perspex sea-anchor attached to myself in order to get it into the water. Toting the housing around has also thrown my buoyancy for a loop, so I’m having to consciously adjust some things to get my air consumption back where it was in the good old days. (I’ve decided that my next camera will probably have a manufacturer-built housing, or I won’t buy it.)

Anyway. After much debate I also splurged on the Ikelite W-30 wide angle lens, which cost more than the housing and which has been my only recent Ikelite purchase that has worked flawlessly and hasn’t needed replacement or repair, probably because it has no electronic or mechanical parts. It’s magnificent. It screws onto the outside of the housing, and is a wet lens, which means that upon getting into the water you have to make sure that all the air gets out and water fills the space between the lens and the housing, otherwise you get a line across the middle of your photos. Same goes for when you get out of the water – the lens has to drain before you can use it on land.

My most sustained use of the camera so far has been on our Red Sea trip last October – you can see all the underwater photos on flickr in my wreck dives set, reef dives set, and night dives set. I am still using it mostly on the automatic and very simple manual settings, but I expect that playing with the camera on land (which I haven’t had time to do much of) will make me more confident with it underwater. The buttons on the housing are very hard to use with gloves on or cold fingers, and they are extremely close together, which means you have to learn what each one does (or carry a cheat sheet on dives) in order to change settings underwater. Despite these complaints, you can access all the camera’s controls via the housing, which is more than can be said for other housings.

The camera flash is immensely powerful. The housing comes with a diffuser (for photography without an external strobe) and a shield to completely block the flash from the front when the strobe is on. I use the latter when I attach my AF-35 Autoflash, which works like a charm. I have tried using the flash on the camera while underwater, but you have to be quite far away from your subject to avoid blowing out the image.

Apart from the clip issue on the housing, I’ve been very happy with the camera so far and am looking forward to doing some more underwater macro photography, since the DSC-RX100 focuses much closer than the DSC-TX5 (and indeed any other camera we own). I’m also enjoying its very easy to use video function, as you may have noticed from the proliferation of videos on the blog since April 2013! I’ve added a video light that has come in handy for photography on night dives, but that’s another story…

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Dive sites (Durban): Bikini

Unfortunately my dive on Bikini – the second one I did in Durban – was really horrible, as my mask kept flooding (I think I had hair caught under the skirt). After a while fighting off the feeling of imminent drowning became too exhausting, and I surfaced early. I didn’t take many photographs, but what I remember of the creatures on view is that they were many and varied – geometric moray eels, lionfish, scorpionfish, nudibranchs, a frogfish and the other usual suspects found on South Africa’s east coast. I took so few photos that I’ve borrowed a lovely one that Maurice took of said eel. Here it is:

The reef structure was much like we see at Sodwana, made of sandstone with potholes and little overhangs. I saw mostly soft corals – none of the big plate corals that are common in southern Mozambique and beyond. This reef is part of the Blood Reef system that stretches along parallel to the Bluff. The reef system got its name because the old whaling station used to pump out blood and offal from slaughtered whales into the ocean, causing the reef to thrive and supporting an impressive population of oceanic white tip sharks. We didn’t see any sharks – I’m sure they were all too busy being killed in the gill nets off the Durban beaches to come and visit divers.

Bikini Reef is small, and covers the good bits (this is allegedly the origin of its name). It’s a regular haunt of pineapplefish, but the current was going in the wrong direction for us to comfortably visit the overhang that many of these fish frequent. We had a pleasant drift dive (mask issues aside) and an easy introduction to the Blood Reef complex.

I should mention that my Durban photos are mostly questionably lit and poorly executed because I am using a new camera, and prior to the Durban trip had only done two dives with it! Hopefully matters will improve so I don’t have to revert back to my trusty Sony DSC-TX5. I’m still using the Ikelite AF-35 strobe, though (not that it’s much in evidence here).

Dive date: 19 June 2013

Air temperature: 23 degrees

Water temperature: 22 degrees

Maximum depth: 23.5 metres

Visibility: 20 metres

Dive duration: 28 minutes

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Adding a strobe: the Ikelite AF35 Autoflash

Proper underwater photographers, having viewed the quality of my normal photographic output, may argue that me enhancing my camera set up (currently just a Sony DSC-TX5 with an MPK-THJ housing missing one small bit of rubber) would be like putting lipstick on a pig (not sure who or what the pig is in this analogy). It’s still a pig, at the end of it all. This was my suspicion too, but with encouragement from those who believe in my limited abilities even when I don’t (how lofty does that sound – I’m talking about my husband here) I decided to try and get my hands on some sort of lighting rig to assist the Sony’s tiny, tiny flash. The loss of the aforementioned piece of rubber also meant that for close-up shots, there was a weird thing going on where the flash only fell on one side of the photo, because the now-uncovered metal rim around the flash diffuser on the housing caused it to reflect.

The Ikelite AF35 attached to my Sony camera housing

With assistance from Shannon at Orca Industries I acquired an Ikelite AF35 Autoflash kit. This wasn’t cheap – none of this stuff is – and cost about the same as my current camera and housing did when I bought them. (Of course a week after bringing them home I saw the camera and housing on special for 30% less elsewhere, but that’s another story.) However, it cost a lot less than a new and more powerful camera, which would have been my other option had I been able to justify and wangle it financially.

The AF35 is made to fit camera housings that don’t have the little widgets required for ordinary TTL (“through the lens”) strobe sensors, that usually sit just in front of the lens on the camera housing and are the size of pencil erasers on curly wires. You know the ones I mean. They tell the strobe how strongly to fire based on the available light. The sensor on the AF35 is the size of a large ice cube and is positioned on the strobe arm, and – forgive me for not using the correct words here, as this whole area of electronics is new to me – reacts fast enough that when the flash on your camera fires, the AF35 is activated while the shutter is still open.

Setting it up was embarrassingly easy – there are detailed instructions in the box, but basically I turned the dial on the strobe arm to 1, turned the strobe on at its head, made sure the camera housing was positioned next to the strobe arm, and pressed the shutter button. Voila! (If this doesn’t work, I think you’re supposed to turn the dial to 2, and try again. Or start at 5. The instructions have it.)

I used the strobe for the first time on our trip to Mozambique. It was fabulous. I’m still figuring out how best to position it to avoid backscatter (we did have some Cape Town-like visibility on some of the dives) but I got better results immediately. The three dimensional effect and bright colours are something to behold. For everything except really wide-angle far off stuff I used the strobe on the lowest setting, or on Auto (TTL – so automatic exposure adjustment). I found the Auto mode to be too strong if the subject of the shot filled too little of the frame, because the exposure level is determined by averaging across the entire frame. For things far off, such as leopard sharks, I cranked the strobe up to maximum and held thumbs.

This isn’t a very good set up for macro work (this probably isn’t news to you), but in some situations I was able to adjust the strobe arm to provide only a very little light to close up objects. Ikelite supply a little piece of rubberised black velcro to cover the flash diffuser on your housing – only a tiny bit of flash is required to trigger the strobe, and the idea is that you don’t actually need the additional contribution from the built-in flash. Once or twice I turned off the strobe and removed the velcro for a shot, but this is asking for trouble. That velcro is going to get lost. Fortunately they supplied five times as much as one needs with the strobe.

The Ikelite AF35 is made to fit a large range of compact camera housings, made by Sony, Panasonic, Olympus and Canon. It goes without saying that it also fits all Ikelite ultracompact housings, and some of their compact housings too. There’s a camera housing compatibility chart here but it didn’t help me at all as my camera housing isn’t listed. The strobe tray and arm comes with a set of little black plastic spacers, shaped like flat, chewy dog bone toys. You select the one that fits your housing, remove a strip of plastic to reveal some adhesive, and stick it onto the housing tray. The appropriate housing then screws onto the tray in such a way that you can open it without removing the strobe arm. The adhesive on the spacer is poor, and mine fell off after five dives. Fortunately I caught it, and I’ve set it aside until I need to unscrew my camera from the tray and replace it. When the housing is screwed on tightly, you can actually take the spacer off. Just keep it, because if you ever need to reassemble the set up you will need it.

When the flash (covered with velcro) fires and the strobe doesn't

In addition to the housing compatibility issue, you need to ensure that the camera you’re using emits a pre-flash. Most digital cameras do this apparently. It goes without saying that your flash needs to be turned on at all times in order for the strobe to fire.

The strobe uses four AA batteries. I used good quality rechargeables and probably got about 300 shots (in 25 degree water – I expect less in Cape Town) before the recycle time dropped to 10-15 seconds, at which time (1) Ikelite recommend you change the batteries and (2) the photographer gets somewhat cranky and impatient.

The housing plus camera varies between slightly positively and slightly negatively buoyant depending on depth of the dive, and with the addition of the strobe there’s hardly any noticeable difference. The tray and arm are more or less neutrally buoyant, and because the arm is bendy I can hook it over my forearm at the safety stop or while I’m unclipping it from my BCD next to the boat.

Here is some good reading on TTL, strobes, with more advanced stuff here – just look at all the technical stuff I’m still learning.

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