First experience with underwater photography and the SeaLife DC800

As promised in my last posting about my scuba diving safari through the Southern part of the Egypt Red Sea here now comes my report about lessons learned and first experience with underwater photography in general and the SeaLife DC800.

SeaLife DC800 Underwater Housing

I purchased the SeaLife DC800 from divestore.de for around € 700 as a package together with a flash light SL 961 and a bag. It is supposed to be a camera suitable for beginners as well as satisfying advanced photographers. The camera comes with numerous programs especially also for underwater photography. A “Sea” mode allows taking good pictures also without a flash light and further options allow to specify whether you are in the blue ocean or green river water. It is a 8 mega pixel camera and allows capturing videos in VGA resolution. The flash light has the great advantage to support an automatic mode as well as adjusting intensity manually – which turned out to be a real important feature.

"My very first underwater shot with the SeaLife DC800"

Befoe using the camera under water I tried it out on land, as recommended in the instruction manual, without and with housing. The first pictures I shot to me appeared to be less brilliant and sharp than the one my Sony Cybershot DSC-S90 delivers, which of course is well known for its good quality photos.  The results however I now brought back from my scuba diving safari have convinced me that I have made a good purchase with a good cost/performance ratio. People who know what you would have to pay for a professional underwater camera or video camera probably would agree with me.

I spent almost the entire last Sunday to create a slideshow with Windows Movie Maker including combining my video clips to a 8 minute video, burned it on DVD and watched it on my LCD TV screen: absolutely nice and convincing ! Throughout my slideshow one can see how my skills taking underwater shots improved. At the beginning I had some problems with using the flash light properly and lots of photos are too dark ( see my lessons learned further down below ). Later on photos turn out to have more light and color and some time I also got the idea to use the zoom function and take closer shots.

A few of my photos and some video clips are available on my flickr-Account.

As I mentioned in my last posting here underwater photography is more complicated than taking photos on land.

Too dark shot

First of all on land you usually stand secure on both legs ( most of the time ) while under water you first have to maintain a proper buoyancy before pushing the trigger. Additionally you try to find a nice view angle to your motif and may be a point at a rock or reef to hold to for a more stable position. During that you have to avoid hitting the sand with your fins since then the sight very quickly might turn into a milky environment ruining your photo.

Another challenge is the proper adjustment of your flash light intensity. The SL 961 as most probably most flash lights has of course an automatic mode but this turned out not to work well in all situations. As long as you take a picture of a fish may be 2 meters away in blue water it works quiet well, but as soon as you are getting closer to something or in case you have sand or light corals as a background the flash intensity appears to be too high. Luckily – as a real valuable and important feature – the SL 961 comes with a control dial to manually adjust the flash intensity on a scale from 10 to 1. In those situations I just described a setting of 2 or 1 turend out to be sufficient to get a photo with the right amount of light.

Shot with too much light

As many beginners I went through a couple of mistakes at the beginning I like to share here with you:

• Wrong adjustment of the flash light angle. I assumed wrongly I should have the flash light arm adjusted in a way that the flash light was more pointing downwards to get a good light for a photo in 2 meters distance. This yielded photos being too dark and it turned out to better have the flash light more pointing straight forward or just slightly down.
• After the first re-charge of the camera and putting it back into the housing I forgot to set the slider on top of the camera to the “capture” position; I left it in the “display” mode. In this situation there was no way to get the camera into capture mode under water. (Unfortunately this happened during the dive when we met a shark under our boat ). This is mentioned in the instruction manual but a good hint for further dives is: turn on the camera once before jumping into the water to see whether it is in the correct mode, especially after you had taken it out of the housing before the dive. Once the slider is set right the camera is in a mode where you can change to all other modes through the DISP key: you can view all your pictures under water and you can also put it into video capture mode.
• One time it happened to me that accidentially I pushed the power switch instead of the tripper to stop a video capture. This caused the camera to hang up completely thus it became unusable for the rest of the dive and after getting back on the boat I had to remove the batteries to fix that situation. Luckily this happened towards the end of a dive.

I noticed the following two strange behaviors of my camera :

• When turning on the flash light initially the red light does not turn on and I am not sure whether the flash light actually operates properly. Only after moving the slider to the TEST position once the red light then turns on right away after setting back the slider to ON.
• Below a depth of 30 meters my camera started to behave real strange:  When pushing the DISP button it started to ask me whether I want to delete pictures.  Hmmm ….

Overall I am happy with the SeaLife DC800 now allowing me to capture nice remembrances of my dives. It is handy and delivers good pictures, especially the quality of videos surprised me in a positive way, and in combination with the flash light SL 961 it is a real powerful equipment to take nice underwater photos.

Scuba Diving in the Southern Red Sea

Southern part of the Egypt Red Sea

This year my wife and I traveled to Egypt for a 1 week scuba diving safari in the southern region of the Egypt part of the Red Sea ( which itself reaches further down up to Eritrea ), after we had been there last year to explore the North.

Our dive sides in the Red Sea

In the middle of the night – at 01:15 am on May 28th – our group of divers from our local scuba diving club met at Frankfurt airport terminal 2 to check in for TUIFly flight 6102 to Hurghada, which departed on time at 03:20 am. After 4,5 hours flying time we landed in Egypt and started our second part of the trip, a 6 hours bus ride to Hamata. On our way we picked up our two dive guides for the week, Sonya from Switzerland and Vanessa from Spain, at a hotel in Port Ghalib.

At late afternoon we went on board the M/Y Emperor Elite. After the boat briefing we had to fill out a lot of paper work and clarify all kinds of questions with our dive guides about our last dive, number of dives, health, and a few more topics. After dinner we went to bed quiet quickly after this long journey without any sleep. Nevertheless, the boat had started its long trip down into the South to the Abu Fandera Reef so the engine was running all night long and we did not get much sleep either in this night.

“Welcome on board the M/Y Emperor Elite“

Wakeup was at 06:30 am the next day for our first early morning and check dive. Like last year I used 11 kilogram additional weight and that turned out to be just right. The strenuous  journey the day before had been  forgotten real quick as soon as I entered the water.   We stayed at this reef for this and the next day and enjoyed 5 relaxing dives there.

Real quick we started to feel comfortable with the daily boat routine schedule: wakeup at 06:00 or 06:30, briefing, early morning dive, breakfast, a video presentation by Sonya about interesting subjects like “Life in the sand”, “Corals”, “Fish”, “Symbiosis”, “Night Dives”, based on film material produced at the Fiji islands, a rest period, next briefing, next dive, lunch, a rest period, briefing, dive, dinner. My wife and I did not do any night dives, three dives a day was quiet enough for us. Sometimes the boat had to travel for a few hours to get to a new dive side during the day. From day 2 on no more shipping during night, thus we now were able to catch more relaxing sleep. The food on board has been excellent and nobody got sick.

On 05/30 we went to the Dangerus Reef, Gota Sachaira and to St. John’s, where I did my first cave dive. No real caves – I probably never will do that – those caves had some exit at the top most of the time.

Sealife DC800

For this scuba diving trip I bought myself a first real underwater camera, a Sealife DC800. It turned out for me that underwater photography is much more complicated than taking pictures on land. I had to make myself familiar with the new equipment and I had to learn my lessons regarding underwater photography; more about this in a separate posting. Correctly adjusting the flash light and maintaining a proper buoyancy had been the main challenges for me. First results can be seen here on my flickr account.

After the St. John’s Caves we traveled much further North and visited Claudia, Abu Galawa with a little boat wrack, and Shiriniat, before we continued our trip to the famous Elphinstone Reef. Until that time our dives had been quiet easy and relaxing, now it started to become more advanced: we went down to depth up to 40 meters and had to deal with strong currents. We did three dives here and the first two had been quiet a challenge for me. During these dives we have been dropped off above the northern plateau and every time I was struggling to escape the current and get close to the wall on the Eastern side to start the drift towards the South. Vanessa signaled me to go deeper to find a weaker current there during the first dive which indeed worked nicely, and during the second dive Sonya had to pull me closer to the wall. The third dive became easier since we skipped the North Plateau and started our dive right away behind the main reef on the West to then do a smooth drift to the South Plateau and getting back to our boat without the need to be picked up by a Zodiac.

“Yellow couple at Abu Dabab II“

Real quickly the week went by. On the evening of the last day on sea we got a special dinner with a huge turkey and a big cake for desert, combined with some Thanks speeches to the crew, music and dancing. The next day we did two more dives, at  Abu Dabab II and Shouna not far away from Port Ghalib, where we also observed a big school of dolphines on the surface. Some of us chased them to go snorkeling but usually they disappeared real quick when the Zodiac approached them.

At the evening we stayed on board in the marina of Port Ghalib and did a short walk through the newly built hotel and shopping area there, before we watched a soccer game evolving between divers and crew members in front of the boat. Two harbor sheriffs appeared to stop that and Vanessa had to have a phone call with their boss to get the game going again.

The next day we had to leave the boat at 09:00 am and stayed in a hotel at the pool for the next 6 hours before a bus took us back to the airport in Hurghada, where our flight back home departed at 09:05 pm. It became 03:00 am in the night until my wife and I got back home, tired but lucky about this interesting trip to the Red Sea, real busy but busy in a different way: no time to think about work, somehow relaxing to follow a tied schedule made to support lots of fun and wonderful dives.

Here is a list of my dives:

#	Date	Depth	Duration	Dive side
1	05/29/2009	22.5 m	44′	Abu Fandera East
2	05/29/2009	17.4 m	47′	Abu Fandera East
3	05/29/2009	22.7 m	42′	Abu Fandera East
4	05/30/2009	19.6 m	49′	Abu Fandera West
5	05/30/2009	19.6 m	48′	Abu Fandera West
6	05/30/2009	22.4 m	45′	Dangerus Reef
7	05/31/2009	22.2 m	45′	Gota Sachaira (Shaab Mahrous)
8	05/31/2009	16.7 m	51′	Umharim (St. John’s Cave)
9	06/01/2009	12.9 m	58′	Claudia
10	06/01/2009	16.6 m	55′	Abu Galawa Soghaira
11	06/01/2009	12.4 m	62′	Shiriniat
12	06/02/2009	32.1 m	36′	Elphinstone Reef
13	06/02/2009	37.7 m	35′	Elphinstone Reef
14	06/02/2009	38.0 m	46′	Elphinstone Reef
15	06/03/2009	15.8 m	57′	Abu Dabab II
16	06/03/2009	28.6 m	45′	Shouna

Schedule constraints

Yesterday I have been blogging about my recent scuba diving trip on a boat through the Northern part of the Red Sea.

Diving equipment on board of the Emperor Infinity

One thing I became aware of during this trip was how difficult it must have been for our captain and the dive guides to come up and manage the daily schedule for all of us on the boat, to support timely meals, breaks and dives. There are so many constraints to consider and deal with day by day, like:

• fixed time slots for the meals ( you don’t want to wait for breakfast until 01:00 pm ),
• sufficient breaks between dives, also depending on the depth of the last dive
• sufficient breaks after a meal,
• selection of the next dive site, depending on weather, currents ( depending itself on low/high tide schedule ), utilization of dive site by other boats and available anchor place, this itself having an impact on the duration of a dive, whether for instance we have to use zodiacs  (inflatable boats) or not
• driving times to the next dive site
• time slot for getting to the next dive site, preferred not during times when meals are served or during the night, when people want to sleep,
• time needed to refill all diving cylinders

Emperor Infinity reached its final parking position at Ras Mohammed National Park

This in fact required some solid planing day by day, consideration of all the wishes by group members, options, risks and safety considerations and constraints, and a good communication between captain and dive guides.

Having a check list of all the constraints available when coming up with a schedule for a project and ensuring all of those are considered before the schedule is finalized and communicated to all stakeholder, customer and team member, is an essential to-do for project manager ! How easy can it happen that you publish a schedule and then you realize for example: Damn ! I forgot to ask my team members about their vacation plans !

What are the typical constraints for a project schedule ? Here are those I can think of right away  – what would you add to this list ?

• Working hours
• Vacation plans
• Limited availability of people and other resources ( like e.g. someone working only half a day, or never working on a Friday )
• Holidays
• Dilvery lags for ordered items
• Time slots for software deploys  ( or freeze periods )

Scuba Diving in the Northern Red Sea

I just returned from a 1 week scuba diving safari on board the Emperor Infinity through the Northern part of the Red Sea.

On Thursday, May 22nd, 20 folks from our local scuba diving club “Tauchertreff Mainz” met at Frankfurt airport around noon time to board a Condor flight to Hurghada, Egypt. It was dark already when we landed and right away we had been transfered to our boat, the M/Y Infinity, waiting for us in the Hurghada marina close to the Emperor diving center.

After an initial boat briefing, diner, sleep, breakfast, a lot of paperwork and another security briefing our boat left the harbor the next morning. We stopped for our check dive at Poseidons Garden (@ Shab El Erg) and I noticed that I would need 11 kilogramm lead here in the Red Sea to adjust to a proper buoyancy while I had used 6 kilogramm only during my pool training the Friday before. The Red Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of seawater in the world.

Crossing the Street of Gubal

Our second dive site for this day: the Dunraven, our first wrack dive. Built in 1873, the ship sunk in 1876 after hitting a reef. After this dive we had a rough ride across the Street Of Gubal (Gulf Of Suez), since it has been pretty stormy, to reach the “Ras Mohammed” National park, located south of the Sinai peninsula,  where we would do several dives the next day.

Day 3 ( Sunday, May 25th ) took us to the “Small Crack”, a nice dive along a reef ending in a shallow sandy lagoon,  and the Thistlegorm, another very famous wrack in the Northern Red Sea, a British Navy ship sunk by German bombers in 1941, discovered by Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the early 50th. On day 4 we visited another wrack, the Kingston, and did two more dives at Bluff Point, famous for its strange currents and also called the “Laundry machine”, but peaceful this time, where also a small barge wrack can be discovered, home of a giant Moray eel. On our journey to the next stop dolphins accompanied our boat during the hour of sunset.

“giannis d 009″ by Cathy Thomas

On day 5, Tuesday, May 27th, we visited “Gubal Malak” for the morning dive, then the “Abu Nuhas” reef, where four ship wracks are waiting on the ground to be visited by divers. Before lunch and in the afternoon we took a closer look at the Carnatic and the Giannis D, the latter a pretty “new” wrack of a ship sunk in 1983.

Day 6 already was our last diving day, “Small Giftun“, where I did my deepest dive so far: 34.8 meters, and “Gota Abu Ramada West”, where I did my longest dive so far, our last dive sites. At this day we returned to Hurghada and stayed on the boat for another day, until a Condor flight brought us back to Germany on Thurday, May 29th, where we landed Friday morning at around 01:00 am.

Zodiak ride to a dive site

It has been a fantastic trip with a nice group of people on a comfortable boat with 10 very mindful and helpful crew members and three very professional and nice dive guides, two from Argentina and one from Germany, with lots of beautiful dive sites, a full schedule ( 06:30 am wake-up, 07:00 am first briefing, morning dive, breakfast, some rest, briefing, second dive, lunch, some rest, briefing, third dive, some rest, briefing and night dive ( not for me ! ), dinner at around 09:00 pm, a beer, sleep, … ) and lots of nice experiences and adventures. Even it has been a very enjoyable week I also must say that 1 week for such type of trip is enough. At the end almost two third of our group encountered some problems with their ears, colds or other type of sickness and thus a break after one week of diving was well accepted.

In total I did 15 dives (just missed 1) and those of us who also did the night dives ended up with 20 dives; as far as I can tell actually nobody managed to do all the dives offered. Here is a detailed list of dives I did ( dive # 15 is my 49th dive in total ):

Number	Date	Depth	Duration	Dive site
1	05/23/2008	13.8 m	45′	Poseidons Garden
2	05/23/2008	28.3 m	36′	Dunraven
3	05/24/2008	25.1 m	45′	Ras Ghozlani
4	05/24/2008	20.1 m	45′	Shark Reef: Anemony-Yolanda
5	05/24/2008	24.5 m	41′	Skark Reef: Volanda Reef
6	05/25/2008	18.9 m	44′	Small Crack
7	05/25/2008	24.7 m	39′	Thistlegorm
8	05/26/2008	19 m	47′	Kingston
9	05/26/2008	15 m	37′	Bluff Point
10	05/26/2008	13.6 m	48′	The Barge
11	05/27/2008	24.5 m	54′	Gubal Malak
12	05/27/2008	23.5 m	56′	Carnatic @ Sha’ab Abu Nuhas
13	05/27/2008	20.5 m	52′	Ghiannis D @ Sha’ab Abu Nuhas
14	05/28/2008	34.8 m	50′	Small Giftun
15	05/28/2008	11.9 m	72′	Gota Abu Ramada West