Cheap, inexpensive underwater film cameras for snorkeling or scuba diving in Kona Hawaii.

A lot of people tend to think of underwater photography as a thing they're going to have to spend hundreds of dollars just to get started and don't realize there are reltively cost effective cameras available for those who just want to take a few snapshots while they are snorkeling or diving.

We carry the Snap Sights Sports Utility Cam at our shop. It's a basic housed film point and shoot camera. You'll find "underwater" single use cameras that are good to 12/15/30 feet around at a lot of places. These cameras are a bit beefier... they're good to 100 foot depths, so they're great for snorkelers, kayakers, and scuba divers. These specific cameras are quite nice in that they come loaded with 27 shots and are refillable/reusable... you can put another roll of film in when you are done and take them back underwater again. They are also quite nice in that they come with a built in flash, you'll have a chance at taking a picture with good color. Water tends to absorb color, and without a flash the pictures can look dull and bluish. With a flash, you add light back so you get your color back. The flash is really only good to about arm's length or so but it really helps bring back the true color of what you're looking at if you're about 2-3 feet away or so.

These cameras are a fun and reltively inexpensive (we're selling them for $19.99 at our shop) way to try underwater photography and bring home some memories without breaking the bank.

Aloha,

Steve

First results with my Olympus e-pl1 underwater...

I took a quick dive yesterday with the new camera and underwater housing. First thoughts... a flash would be helpful... adn I need to shoot RAW. It was a very gray afternoon, and there was a pretty strong south swell, so the Place of Refuge was a bit more mucked up than usual... probably 60 foot of viz in the shallows and 80-90 at depth.

Wow! The camera reacted quickly, locks focus practically instantaneously compared to the cameras I've used in the past. I was using the underwater settings that are hidden on the camera... Olympus does a very poor job at explaining how to get at them in their manual, had to look it up on a message board, it's easy to get to and they have an underwater macro and underwater wide angle mode you can toggle back and forth between at will... more on that in another post. I spent most of the time just pointing at things using the underwater macro mode.

I took a bunch of photos, some of them turned out OK. The biggest issue was the dark day and lack of light made for typical underwater blueish photos. Without shooting in RAW, where you can adjust the white balance after the fact, and not taking time to custom white balance the photos underwater as I was taking them, I had to rely on my weak photoshop skills to get the proper colors on the fish. This photo of an Ornate Butterfly fish turned out pretty OK.

I'm off to the shop for the afternoon... open noon 'til 6 on weekends.

Steve

Olympus Pen PT-EP01 underwater housing for Oly's E-PL1 camera review...

Aloha,

I just received the housing for my Olympus E-pl1 camera. I refused the urge to go down the hill and do a dive with it today, tomorrow morning I'll have to. I took the time to read the manual, it actually comes with a reasonable sized manual, something I haven't seen with a lot of housings I've had before.

My first impressions are that it's well made. In the box comes the housing, o-ring, o-ring grease, dessicant packs, rubber LCD hood, a rigid lens cover. It also comes with an application for DEPP insurance. DEPP insures gear sets and underwater photo equipment. The housing features a new-ish locking system that Olympus has come with in the last couple of years that seems pretty good. The back of the housing is a transparent polycarbonate type of material. My only gripe is that only the bottom part of the back is polished to clear so you can readily see the o-ring and check for moisture... I'd like to see it polished to where you could see the entire o-ring to check on your seal. The buttons on the back of the housing are really nice, they're larger than I'm used to on other housings, and they're labeled nicely - almost better than the buttons on the camera are labeled.

I was happy to see the lens cover and LCD hood as the company that sold the housing had those available as "replacements" and I decided not to purchase them at the time. "Replacement" to me implies they come with the original purchase, but if you look up the housing on Olympus' site, they have the zoom gear ring listed as a "replacement" item, yet it does not come with the original purchase. I think Oly ought to change their website to say "optional" on the zoom gear, as the way they have it makes it unclear as to whether it comes with the original purchase or not. It doesn't. I did pick up the zoom gear as a separate purchase. The zoom gears are basically rubber gears that fit tightly around the camera lens which matches up with a small gear on the front of the housing so you can use the zoom. It's an extra 45 bucks, but well worth it. Different sizes of zoom gears are available, as the housing has been made to accept a couple different lenses and the gear needs to fit the specific lens.

The other purchase at the time of the order was the macro lens mount. It's a rigid plastic piece that fits over the front port of the housing and will accept 67 mil threaded lenses. I have an Inon 67 mil macro lens already so I'm set there. The lens adaptor is another 45 bucks... it all adds up.

The housing itself is pretty big compared to the Canon housing I had for my G9, but it's quite comparable to the size of the Ikelite housing I had for my Olympus 8080 several years back. The Olympus E-pl1 is one of the smallest interchangeable lens cameras available these days, and the housing is also. Olympus could have made the housing a bit smaller by eliminating the space for the optional electronic viewfinder. I'm sure they put that in there to appease the people who love using viewfinders rather than using the LCD. In my opinion the LCDs with live view have sort of revolutionized underwater photography, I suspect we'll see less use of viewfinders in the future. Even with it's somewhat largish size, it's quite a bit smaller than most of the DSLR housings we see come on the boat. Price of the housing is $599, I found it for $75 less. It sounds like a lot of money, but the typical DSLR housing begins at around $1200 and can top a couple grand easily. Olympus has made it so you can get an interchangeable lens system underwater for what has been the price of just an economy housing in the past.

Unlike most of the smaller point and shoot housings, this housing is not made for use of the onboard flash for taking photos. It's set up so the onboard flash can trigger a remote flash.. that's another expense down the line. For now I'll be shooting with available light.

I can't wait to get it wet.

Olympus PEN e-pl1 Micro four thirds camera and underwater housing.... I want....

Aloha,

Haven't posted in a while. I've been busy with work and life lately, and haven't had new photos to work with too much since my camera died early last fall, so I got away from posting the last couple weeks. I have been researching camera choices though, and I've pretty much got a camera targeted.

My early forays into underwater digital photography were with Olympus cameras, I kept upgrading... easy habit to do once you get the bug... and ended up with an Olympus 8080. At the time I thought, gee, too bad someone doesn't make a camera about this size with interchangeable lenses.... After the 8080 I picked up an SP350, very easy to use and small... loved it. After that I picked up a Canon G9... loved it too, although the learning curve wasn't immediate for me with the new menus and such. When it died last fall (around August/September) I planned on waiting to see what was around the corner for cameras.

The Canon G11 had been announced, then I found out about the Canon S90 (sort of a G11 crammed into a small package). Both cameras are great and I was very interested in the S90 because of the size.... Well, a couple of falls ago Olympus and Panasonic got together and announced a new format of camera, Micro 4/3rds, which sort of is a hybrid between a high end point and shoot and an interchangeable lens DSLR. When I heard that I've been keenly watching the progress of the camera lines. Then, earlier this year, it happened.... Olympus announced and has just put out a micro 4/3 camera with an underwater housing. I think it's been decided which camera I make the move to next.

I've been researching the camera and housing a bit. Since they just came out, there's a huge lack of anything about them to be found readily on the net, coming at it from an underwater hobbyist's viewpoint at least. You've pretty much got to glean through Olympus' site and a couple of the online camera catalogs and try to figure it out your own at this point as far as for underwater use goes. The camera is getting good user reviews on dpreview.com, that's a plus, but it's all above water stuff. There's tons of 1 page "reviews" by gadget gurus which are little more than announcements, nothing that really gets into readily listing what you need to really get this camera water ready. Coming from the point and shoot world and into the world of trays, strobe arms, strobes and such it's quite a bit to sift through. I'm gonna give it a try myself... and once I've got it all together (could be weeks or months, you never know) I'll report back on my experience. I'm looking forward to another new camera learning experience that'll keep my UW photo hobby exciting for me 'til I get the next bug to upgrade.... of course this all assumes I'm getting the camera - Pat's amazed I've held off this long, but I've got a shop to put together for the summer.

I hope to be displaying some photos from a new camera sometime in the next month or so. For now, here's a repeat posting of one of my favorite shots that Pat has taken with her G9. It's of a frogfish. We've started seeing the juveniles appear again, it's that time of year. They're sooooo cool!!!

Lots of good scuba diving lately in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii....

I've been really busy this month. We had a slow September so October has been a pleasant surprise. Today we had the day off, so it was football day... we had some Corvallis, Oregon area friends visiting so we all sat down and watched the USC Trojans vs. the Oregon State Beavers football game. Good game, our team was on the wrong end of the 6 point game though.

Water conditions for scuba diving in Kona have been pretty darned good lately. We've had a run of very good divers on the boat the last several weeks, so nearly all of our dives have been in the 75-90 minute range. Bob's off in Sulawesi Indonesia for some diving fun, so Cathy and I have been splitting all of the diving the past couple of weeks.

I haven't been carrying a camera around since my G9 stopped working. Tomorrow we've got a light load with a couple of gals carrying cameras, so I might take my wife's older camera down to see if I can get some shots off. I'm so spoiled these days, after diving with a camera with a 3" LCD for a couple of years, we'll see if I can tolerate going back to something with a large postage stamp sized LCD screen. I've got my eye on 2 models right now, the Canon G11 and the Canon S90. I'm waiting to see what comes out for housings from third parties for them in the next couple of weeks. I'll discuss more of what I'm looking at in a later post.

Since I'm not taking pics right now, I'm playing around with photoshop on some of the older ones. This pic has been on the blog before, maybe a year or so ago. My wife, Pat, took this frogfish shot on a dive. My older version of it had a hotspot on the forehead, this one we managed to tone it down a bit. I'm looking at downloading the new beta version of Lightroom my next day off and playing around with it to see how well the slider adjustments work on my older jpegs.

Aloha,

Steve

Here's a nice nudibranch photo...

I liked this photo from today. We had just one diver who's been with us for a couple of weeks, so we decided to do a couple of drift dives. I dove the second dive... lots of cool stuff.... dolphins underwater, a manta ray, a bunch of nudibranchs, a large spiny lobster, an octopus... all around good dive.

We found this Gold Lace Nudibranch towards the end of the dive. I probably took a dozen photos of it before I got this pic... either out of focus, rhinophores tucked in, gills tucked in, ect... it finally spread out and I got an in focus shot at the same time. I took this with my Canon G9 with Inon closeup lens and the Ikelite AF-35strobe. The closeup lens really does a good job of letting you get a decent macro shot, this guy was about an inch and a quarter to inch and a half long and the photo is uncropped. Without the lens I'd have to cut out a lot of the picture in post production to get the nudi to fill this much of the frame.

Aloha,

Steve

Product review: Canon G9 with Canon WP-DC21 housing and Inon UCL-165 closeup lenses and M67 adapter...

Phew, long post title.... Here's the Canon housing for the G9, and the same housing with a Duron M67 adapter and two Inon UCL-165 closeup lenses added on to the housing. Pat and I recently picked up Canon G9 cameras and their associated Canon housings. We really love macro shots and saw some amazing stuff on one of the scuba message boards several months ago and were lusting for whatever allowed those pictures to be taken. After some sleuthing, not all posters want to share for some reason, we found the trick was by adding Inon UCL-165 closeup lenses.

This is a common practice by some people who have housings with threaded ports, you can add "wet" lenses to in effect get either closer or a more wide angle look. The Canon G9 and other simialar series Canons however have an oval port, which requires a 67 millimeter threaded adaptor. The one we found is manufactured in France and is readily available through one or two Japanese mailorder houses (google Yuzo Kanda to find the one we used).

Once the adapter is on you can add the closeup lenses... you can even stack the lenses to get a greater closeup effect. The first picture in this series is of a blue ginger out back of the house. I took it with the camera with the macro lenses from almost as close as it'll go. The second photo is what the camera will do with a single closeup lens added... much enlarged from the original photo in comparison. The third of the series is the same flowers with a second UCL-165 lens stacked on top of the first... much closer yet.

In underwater photography, closer is better... the less water between you and the lens the less to interfere with the image. With this particular camera and housing combo, you can add a single Inon UCL-165 closeup lens and still use the internal flash.
I have yet to try the second lens underwater as of yet, but I suspect it'll require an external strobe as the whole front end of the housing and lenses stick out far enough from the flash and you are close enough to the object that a portion of the internal flash will be blocked by all the add-ons.

The pictures above were quickies just to give you an idea of how much maginifcation the lenses give. I suspect it'll be tricky to get great underwater photos with these, but when everything goes right it might be just quite spectacular. The main reason you want to try to do all the closeup with lenses rather than just blowing it up in post production by cropping with an editor, is that everything you can do optically before working on it will give you a better picture in the end if you try to blow it up to any size.... hard to explain, but if I wanted to take a face photo and blow it up to say (I'll use extremes) 2' by 3' and instead of just taking a face shot I took a shot of the whole person, I'd have to crop out the whole picture except the face and by the time I blew it to umpty-ump times it's original size in post production it'd be very grainy or pixellated... you're better off just shooting the face only.

I've been out of the water with an ear infection for a week and a half... I'll report more soon when I can. I did pick up the external strobe I was looking at and couldn't figure it out underwater... I may have to read the instructions... oh, the horror!! I only had one dive with it before the infection kept me out, so taking the fact that nearly every time I take some new camera underwater I virtually always hate the results, I'm not worried about being able to figure out the flash.

later,

Steve

I picked up a new Inon UCL -165 closeup lens for my camera...

This is one of the early shots with the new closeup lens. I did crop some of the image, but not a whole lot. Inon, as well as other manufacturers, makes "wet" attachment lenses that you can add to the exterior of your underwater housing to acheive closeup or wide angle shots the camera can't normally do. The Canon G9 housing needs a special adapter (the one I found was manufactured by a french company, but only available through Japanese mailorder companies) to accept the lens, and with the adapter the wide angle lens apparently does little, but the closeup lens can do great things.

The lens allows you to get closer to the subject while in maximum zoom, so in my case instead of being 19 or more inches away from the subject in full zoom, I can shoot from roughly 6 inches instead while still fully zoomed in. Many animals can tolerate you being 6 inches away, but to do that normally you wouldn't be able to zoom in and still focus.

I'll do a more thorough review later, including where to find the adapters for the G9 housing and similar housings.

US economic stimulus package = Ikelite AF35 strobe???

So far, every picture that Pat or I have taken since we started going the digital route underwater has been with the onboard flash or with available light. We both now have Canon G9 camera setups and decided that we'll take the opportunity of the stimulus windfall to pick up the Ikelite strobe package linked here:

This strobe isn't a high end strobe package, but it packs a fair punch for the price and might be ideal for our use. I'd been curious about it, as it offers a decent amount of power for macro and nearby pictures, say to about 3-4 feet, for the price. It just came out in the last couple of months so there's not a lot of them out there just yet, but a customer the other week had one and is quite happy with it so far. It's made to be compatible with most of the point and shoot camera setups currently available and has a sensor to make it more or less automatic once you get settings that give you an exposure you are comfortable with. Few, if any, strobe packages give you this much strobe, along with a tray and sensors, for the price.

We'll probably take the plunge in the next few days, then have it by the end of next week and be mad we even bought it after the first use or two or three.... unfortunately, with new cameras and such, it takes a while to actually figure out how best to use what you just picked up. I've "upgraded" 4 times now since getting into the underwater photography thing and each time I wonder if I hadn't made a mistake at first, only to figure out what I'm doing wrong and ending up happy after all. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Here's a macro shot with the Canon g-9

I took advantage of the sun today to take a shot of one of the plants outside of our house. The camera can get much closer, but I wanted to show a bit more of the bloom. This is a closeup photo of a Blue Ginger (Dichorisandra thyrsiflora) which is found in many Hawaiian gardens.

Later,

Steve

More Canon G9 video taken underwater...

Bob had some customers/friends that have dove with him over the years and has been handling the dives the last couple of days. Yesterday I took a quick 35 minute dive between dives while they were having their surface interval. Here's most of the dive compressed into about 8 minutes. Highlights were, cleaner wrasses working a variety of fish, parrotfish feeding on corals, a spotted eagle ray, the biggest unicorn tang I've seen in a long time, garden eels, anthias, various trigger fish, a juvenile razor wrasse, a rather large toby, a helmet snail chasing down a meal, a whitemouth moray hunting with groupers, a large school of heller's barracuda and more....

The camera takes pretty good video. This was just taken with the standard underwater setting at all depths. I didn't try to customize the white balance as I basically was just cruising around shootinng and not trying to do anything special. The soundtrack's a bit wierd, it was the only thing I could find on Youtube that was the appropriate length.

First underwater pics with Canon G9 digital camera with Canon WP-DC21 housing

I went for a long shallow dive (106 minutes, still had roughly 1200 psi left) the other day and took some shots with the new camera. I realized only today that I had a bunch of focusing problems because the camera was using it's default focus method which takes most of what's in the picture into account, and I really wanted to do a spot focus so I could pick exactly what I wanted in focus. This Yellow Margin Moray Eel did turn out quite nice using the default focus though.

We had a fun charter today. One of my passengers showed up obviously stuffed up so I suggested he take the day off. He's also scheduled for tomorrow, if he's cleared up by then he'll be joining us ... otherwise Pat, myself and a friend will go fishing and diving and call it a holo holo day.

later,

Steve

New Camera.... Canon G9 with housing for underwater photography....

Well, I done did it. I've been debating about sending my camera back to Olympus to see if they could repair the flash, buying another camera, or just living with manual white balance 'til I could afford a new camera in the spring.... then Pat said the magic words... "Bill me later". I was unaware of this, but many of the big photo/electronics companies contract out with bill-me-later.com to offer 6 months free interest for their goods. That's about perfect timing for me, so it was done after two days of research.

Here's the camera I chose...



I also picked up the housing for it. The Amazon link actually has pretty good pricing for both the camera and housing (which is available as an accessory), I paid a few extra bucks at the time getting it from a company that had the delayed billing options.

One little story on shipping... very fast and efficient through UPS, however we tracked it and for some reason it actually spent a day in Taiwan after it first reached Honolulu. A couple of years back we brought in something that made it to Honolulu within 12 hours of ordering, somehow went back to the mainland, then back to Honolulu before getting to Kona on time. Gotta wonder about that Honolulu office, neither Taiwan nor the mainland are in a direct line between Honolulu and Kona.

Now I have to figure out how to use the Canon menus and the darned software they send with the camera. I accidently took this photo in RAW and had to figure out how to convert it to JPEG, which I somehow did but can't repeat as it was more or less a random accident that I managed it on this photo. Once I recover from my little bug that's gone to my lungs I'll dive and give a full report on the camera.

Aloha,

Steve

Underwater flash for Olympus camera housings...

I've been thinking about cameras lately since mine have been on the fritz.

Many of the popular cameras actually have underwater housings available and Pat and I have housed several digital cameras over the last few years. The onboard flash on most of them has it's limits and many people look for extra light by adding an external flash. Last year I picked up an Olympus flash and it's appropriate housing for my Olympus SP 350 set up, but it was so bulky I never really used it.

The other day I was checking things out and found this new offering by Olympus...
Olympus UFL 1 - Underwater flash - 14 (m) It's a stand alone underwater flash that is compatible with many of the Olympus underwater camera housings that have a hot shoe, offering TTL exposure without the hassle of wires and strobe trays. I wish they had it back when I was looking. This Amazon price is actually a very good deal, as a housed Olympus flash will cost much more, and trying to get TTL exposure with another brand of flash will run you some serious dollars and effort.

I'll leave you with a sunset photo from quite a while ago. I may have posted it a couple years back, but it may have been a vertical shot rather than horizontal.


Aloha,

Steve

Underwater housings for digital cameras....

One question that we get frequently on our dive charters is about underwater housings for digital cameras. In many cases you do not need to purchase a dedicated underwater camera. Many manufacturers make housings for their cameras, as well as several aftermarket companies who make housings for various camera lines. You can often find a housing for a camera you already have, or you may find one available for one you want to get so you have a camera you can use both above and below the waterline. With a little research on your part, you can often find a camera and housing combination that will cost you less than a dedicated underwater camera AND may be more versatile than the typical prepackaged underwater cameras.

If you already have a camera, you can go to Digideep.com
which has a large listing of cameras and whether there are housings available for those cameras. There are several online companies who stock housings for various camera manufactures and Amazon sells underwater housings as well. Just be sure that when you choose a housing, you are picking a housing made specifically for the camera you are going to use. If you can't find a housing for your particular camera, be sure to check the digideep link I posted earlier.

Aloha,

Steve

We're seeing lots of whales off parts of Kona right now.

Yesterday evening we went down to the picnic area to the south of the Place of Refuge and there were whales right off the shore, maybe 30-40 yards off shore. I didn't have my camera or I could've had some nice tail and back shots.

Today Pat and I did a shore dive up north of Kua Bay with some friends and there were whales everywhere on the horizon.



Here's a simple little reef scene I took with my Olympus sp350 in movie mode. I took it in low resolution and Youtube compresses it even more so it's not much to look at... but turn your volume up a bit and use your imagination and you can hear the whales in the background off in the distance (no kidding). You'll hear lots of static popping, which is actually snapping shrimp in the coral heads, me breathing a lot, and something in the background that sounds like a cross between cows and cellos - that'd be the whales. Hopefully later in the winter I'll be diving where they are louder, we heard them all the dive today but it was fairly much in the background. When it's loud, it's quite impressive.

Later,

Steve

Happy birthday... sort of.

I just noticed that my blog turns one year old tomorrow. My goals for the first year were to post a hundred or so times, and be able to click on the site meter and see that I was getting 4-5 direct requests a day. So far I've made it, with 180 some odd posts and at least 4-5 direct requests daily (direct requests indicate someone is acutally keying in or has "favorited" the URL, half were probably my family or myself, but at least some aren't). Now I've got to come up with some new goals, probably not all that different than the original goals in this case, maybe add another 100 posts minimum and gain an extra 4-5 daily direct requests. I started this because of a recommendation to use a blog to help exposure of my dive business (Wanna Dive - link is on the right side of the page), and I can't say for sure if that's working... but I'm having fun with it anyway, so why not continue?

Today I did an intro dive with someone who was staying in my vacation rental. That person had actually been certified back in the days of horse collars, but has only done a few resort dives since. It went well. Water temps were in the 79-81 degree range on my computer, depending on if in the shallows over the reef, or out on the shoulder. Nice relaxing dive.

It's our "slow season", but I'm still working a stretch of 13 out of 14 days. I've managed to find some great fill in help while Bob is off gallivanting in the Galapagos (lucky him - whale sharks, hammerheads, rays, marine iguanas, sea lions, etc - a lot to see in just 10 days or so), but I'll be happy to have him available again.

The underwater photograph above is of a red-spotted nudibranch. I took a bunch of shots and everything turned off slightly off, but this one is close, could have been a hair crisper on the focus. I discovered/remembered a new little thing/quirk with the Olympus sp-350 (actually noticed this first when taking the pic of the harlequin shrimp I posted earlier), if you are taking macro underwater and you want to get closer, try enabling the digital zoom and see if you like the results. In my case, I was able to fill up more of the frame with the actual subject and keep an effective focus than just using macro and not zooming in to the digital zoom range. I'm not sure if results vary camera to camera or not.

Aloha,

Steve

Tropical fish are really proud of their backsides....

The bane of the underwater photographer is... fish butts. Talk to nearly anyone who's taken underwater photos, and you'll probably hear they have plenty of perfectly focused and exposed shots, only the fish are facing the wrong way.

Nearly all the digital cameras, that are so popular, have a bit of delay. Once you get your subject to where you can focus on them, they turn... happens most every time.

The photos on this page are of a young Hawaiian Lionfish (Pterois sphex). I was real tickled to see this one. The last few years I've only seen them at deep spots in sites not normally dove by the tour companies. It seems like they may have been collected out over the years. This one was at one of the dive sites most companies visit, and in less than 40' of water. They tend to hang out at the same spot, so some time in the future I'll be checking to see if it's there.

I took about a dozen shots of this fish, these two were probably the cleanest... but it was facing the wrong way. The second photo is kind of nice because you can see it's face. I did get a pretty decent face shot, but not a good full body shot... I'll post the face shot on the next post (so you have something to come back for).

Later,

Steve

Funky Kona Manta Ray night dive video

Here's a short video of the Kona Hawaii manta ray night dive off the Kona airport that I shot underwater with my Olympus sp350 on Tuesday night. We work with a local videographer who takes video of our divers and snorkelers (it is broadcast quality stuff, not like what you see here) and I thought I'd poach some of her light and see if my little point-and-shoot digital cam could take the video. Turns out I was too far back and it doesn't do anywhere near as well in low light as a dedicated video camera. After a little tweaking in quicktime, I was able to at least bring up the brightness to where things show up. Pardon for all the psychedelic colors, it's not like that in real life.



Aloha,

Steve

Scuba diving conditions are great in Kona... Lets take a dive...

I was out playing with my Olympus sp-350 underwater on a fun dive (day off today) at the Place of Refuge. Here's an example of the video. The camera does video with quicktime output, I compressed it quite a bit for the internet so the quality is not as good as the camera normally puts out... but it's good enough to share here.

This is just a short glimpse of a typical shallow reef in Kona. In say 5-20 feet of water, lobe coral is our most commonly found coral. Most of the corals in this video are lobe corals.

Aloha,

Steve