| W hoever dives in the thriving and exuberant waters of a tropical sea is unlikely to resist for long the desire to take home a visible reminder of it in the form of photographs. Any type of equipment could be suitable for this purpose even if in order to obtain the best results the more sophisticated and expensive apparatus is necessary whilst the more simple and economical equipment. The camera which has been universally used by underwater photographers throughout the world for the last thirty years is the Nikonos, which was designed as an amphibious camera and can be taken underwater as it is without requiring a watertight housing. By now it is in it's fifth model series and has interchangeable lenses (out of water!) and a good range of lenses, going from an extreme wide-angle lens to a small telephoto lens. |  |
 | The alternative to the Nikonos is the old-fashioned, but still valid, possibility of enclosing a dry land camera in a watertight case. The cameras used in this case are reflex monolens cameras. In all cases an important feature to look for when choosing an underwater camera is the possibility of lens interchange, given that a general lens does not exist and every photographic situation and every subject requires the right lens. The "standard" lens of the Nikonos is 35 mm which allows the photography of fish, sponges, starfish, soft corals, large crustaceans and head and shoulders portraits of divers. The 28 mm is, on the other hand, suitable for slightly larger subjects and allows one to take photographs nearer the subject. The 20 mm is already a quite powerful wide-angle lens and thus is suitable for portraits of divers and large sea animals, shoals of fish, gorgonians and large portions of reef. |
| The mythic 15 mm is, the strongest wide-angle lens in the Nikonos outfit and is used to photograph larger subjects, like wrecks, to portray the reef environment, for portraits of divers from nearby and for large throngs of fish photographed close to. It is a lens with great depth of field, which manages to correct errors in focusing well, but which is not suitable for photographing fish and other subjects of a small size which would appear tiny in the picture.
Furthermore, with a housed reflex camera macro lenses from 50 and 100 mm which are ideal for photographing small sized subjects or animals which are difficult to approach, can be used.
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 | Even if one is taking photographs in the first few meters, the use of an electronic strobe is indispensable, not so much to light up the surroundings as to revive the colors which are filtered and absorbed by the water. Without a flash all underwater photographs would have a bluish monochrome tone; this would be a great pity in a world which is so rich in warm and intense colors. Dozens of models with different prices and characteristics are available on the market. As far as films go there is no choice, reverse-type films, better known as slides, are compulsory. The negative films which provide color prints, give poor chromatic results due to the difficult and incorrect interpretation of underwater colours by automatic printers. As far as sensitivity goes, films from 50-100 ISO are preferable to more sensitive films, in order to obtain a more definite and clearcut image. |
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