GKF 2074

Fotografi Dalam Air

Zulkalnain Zainal Abidin Fakulti Seni Gunaan dan Kreatif

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

Januari 2011

Important dates in the history of underwater photography

It's good to know what went before. Here is a list of events that were important to the history of underwater photography.

1828: Charles Deane and his brother John invented a dive helmet to which a suit was secured with straps. 1837: Augustus Siebe sealed the Deane brothers' diving helmet to a watertight, aircontaining rubber suit. 1850s: German inventor William Bauer takes pictures through the portholes of a submarine he built for the Russian navy 1856: William Thompson takes poor quality photos of seaweed with a primitive underwater camera near Weymouth, England. 1860s: French photographer Ernest Bazin takes photos from a diving bell (1860s). 1865: first self-contained diving equipment with 'open air circulation' by Rouquayrol Denayrouze for diving to 50m. 1870s: Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his chrono-photography of moving subjects, takes underwater photos in San Francisco Bay. 1893: Louis Boutan, a French scientist uses a 'zero-pressure' underwater camera with a compressible air bladder, a principle still used today for large cameras in shallow water. Frame size: 5x7". Exposure time: 30 minutes! 1895: systematic exoperiments by the Frenchman Boutan with 8x10"sudio cameras and flash light constructed by Chaufour, a magnesium-coated ribbon within a glass sphere with oxygen. 1899: first underwater photographs by Louis Boutan in depths below 45m, utilising waterproof arc lamps for illumination! 1900s: Jack Williamson uses a large submersible sphere containing both the cameraman and cameras. It was used for filming Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1913) 1910s: Francis Ward photographs freshwater pikes, otters, frogs and diving water birds. 1915: John Ernest Williamson makes history's first underwater movie in which he kills a shark. 1915: Commander Frederick Young of the Royal Navy developed an underwater camera for the British Admiralty Salvage Department. 1927: National Geographic publishes the first underwater color still photographs made by ichthyologist Dr. William Longly and staff photographer Charles Martin in the Caribbean Sea. It was lit with magnesium powder on a specially constructed float. 1930: Dratz of the Toulon Naval Arsenal in France, improved military underwater photographic equipment. Dr Maurice Ewing and Dr Allyn Vine (USA) developed the Ewing underwater camera with synchronised flash. Sir Robert Davis and U V Bogaerde conducted extensive underwater wreck photography in Falmouth, England. 1933 - Yves Le Prieur modified the Rouquayrol-Denayrouse invention by combining a demand valve with a high pressure air tank to give the diver complete freedom from hoses and lines.

1934: Le Prieur invents self-contained cameras for still and movie in black and white and colour. Oceanographer Dr William Beebe (USA) shoots underwater films inside the Bathysphere at 900m depth.

1935 American Fenimore Johnson uses the self sealing principle in his commercially produced underwater cameras, Ardmore Pennsylvania. 1936: Dr Hofmann (Munich, Germany) explores Lake Constance, photographing the lake's bottom at depths of 240m using an automatic photographic bathysphere. 1937: Danish-American Niels Christensen invents the o-ring for sealing hydraulic equipment. It had a major effect on technology and facilitated the design of underwater housings. Dr Hans Hass (Vienna, Austria) designs a watertight housing for the Zeiss 16mm Movikon camera. 1939: Dr E N Harvey and Edward R Baylor (USA) photograph small organisms at 1260m depth. 1941: US Navy and British Admiralty begin extensive photographic underwater projects for salvage operations, hull inspection, demolition and underwater intelligence. Maurice Ewing and Allyn Vine (USA) design special cameras for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, Mass.) to take photographs at 4860m depth. 1943: Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan invent the underwater lung which frees divers from surface-supplied air. 1943-1945: tremendous increases in underwater still and movie activities. New equipment designed in England by Chesterman, Collins and Hodges. In France by Le Prieur and Cousteau. 1948: first successful photographs at 360m by the US Atlantic Expedition, using remote controlled magnesium flash. 1949: Hans Hass develops in co-operation with the German company Franke & Heidecke the famous Rolleimarin underwater housing for a double-lens reflex Rollei 6x6cm camera. It became the most successful underwater camera of its time, later replaced by the single-lens reflex (SLR) Hasselblad. Dimitri Rebikoff (Cannes, France) develops an electronic strobe flash torpedo for still pictures and one with continuous light for movie. 1950s: Harold E. Edgerton (famous for the stroboscope and multi-flash exposures) and French explorer Jacques Cousteau develop sophisticated deep sea cameras to take photographs of the deep sea bottom. 1952: Dimitri Rebikoff earns a Scientific Film Award at the International Film Festival in Cannes for his colour newsreel Color Palace. 1953-54: Full length underwater feature movies Under the twelve mile reef, Hunters of the deep, Moby Dick, Under water, I photographed the seven seas, and many others. 1954: Dr Harold Edgerton (MIT, USA) develops an underwater still camera with electronic strobe. 1955: Captain J Y Cousteau produces The Silent World, bringing underwater mysteries to a large audience. 1956 - Ted Nixon introduces the red and white "Divers Down" flag.

1956 - The first wetsuit was introduced by researchers at the University of California. Edco produces the first suits. 1960 - Al Tillman (Founder of the Los Angeles County Underwater Unit) and Neal Hess (Columist and Director of the of the National Diving Patrol for Skin Diver Magazine), with help from Garry Howland and John Jones, create the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) and hold its first instructor certification course in Houston during the Underwater Society of America Convention. Tillman adapts the Los Angeles County course to be taught to individuals from any diving venue and NAUI incorporates as a non-profit agency. NAUI becomes the first international certification agency. Early financing and administrative assistance for the agency came from Skin Diver Magazine. 1957: the Belgian inventor Jean de Wouters makes the CalypsoPhot, the first waterproof 35mm amphibic camera that can be used both above and under water. It came on the market in 1961. 1962: Life magazine photographers Elgin Ciampi and Peter Stackpole use plexiglass underwater housings. 1963: the Nikon camera company develops the CalypsoPhot further and releases the Nikonos I, first in a long line of 35mm amphibic cameras, the IVA with TTL light metering (1980) and ending with the V in 1984. The Nikonos has watertight exchangeable lenses of 80, 50, 35, 28 and 15mm and is still today a good expedition backup camera in case all else fails due to dust, dew, moisture or ice. 1964: IITRI and Rebikoff develop a corrected wide angle lens for the Nikonos camera, 28mm in air and 37mm in water. 1970: Optical Sciences Division of the US Naval Research Laboratory develps a new water-flooded camera. 1970 - Scuba Schools International (SSI) was founded by Bob Clark. 1971: Lockheed (USA) develops the DSRV-1, a rescue vehicle for 1000m depth, complete with elaborate photographic and television equipment. 1973: Dr Alexander Ivanoff (Sorbonne, France) develops a new universal wide angle correcting lens for up to 105 degrees. It was extensively used for offshore oil explorations. 1974: Nikon reveals their 15mm water-corrected wide angle lens for Nikonos cameras. Dmitri Rebikoff develops a remotely controlled camera platform for depths to 2000m. 1992: the Nikonos RS 35mm SLR camera for depths to 100m, with an extensive set of very high quality underwater lenses, sets the standard. It is taken off the market in 1996 due to poor demand and internal restructuring at Nikon Japan. 2005: a large range of commercial underwater housings is available for nearly every make and type of still, movie and TV camera. Digital cameras of 6 megapixels have become readily available and with it their underwater housings, but underwater photos won't match the quality of those obtained above. Underwater photography remains a special skill.

History of Scuba Diving

People who have a passion for water would definitely enjoy the marine sport known as scuba diving.

Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus when abbreviated gives us the term SCUBA. The evolution of scuba diving continues to progress thanks to the ever improving development of technology. Other activities that relate to scuba diving include:

- Scientific diving. - Public diving. - Recreational diving. - Technical diving which includes deep diving, wreck diving, cave diving and ice diving. - Commercial diving. - Military diving.

Boyle's Law We are used to living at 1 ATM of pressure, so we rarely even take notice of it. We normally don't feel the pressure on us because the human body is primarily made up of liquid, and liquids are basically non compressible. At times, however, we do notice changes of pressure, primarily in our ears. You may have noticed your ears "popping" when flying, driving in the mountains, or even going up and down in elevators. This is because our ears have an air space in them, and air, like all other gases, is compressible. A gas will compress proportionately to the amount of pressure exerted on it. For example, if you have a 1 cubic foot balloon and double the pressure on it, it will be compressed to 1/2 cubic foot. Increase the pressure by 4, and the volume will drop to 1/4 the size etc. This theory was discovered by Sir Robert Boyle, a 17th century scientist. The theory known as Boyle's Law states: If the temperature remains constant, the volume of a given mass of gas is inversely proportional to the absolute pressure. Let's follow an example... Suppose you had a balloon measuring one cubic foot at the surface of the water. This balloon is under 1 ATM (14.7 psi) of pressure. If we push the balloon underwater, and take it to a depth of 33 feet, it is now under 2 ATM of pressure (29.4 lbs) - 1 ATM of pressure from the air, 1 ATM of pressure from the water. Boyle's Law then tells us that since we have twice the absolute pressure, the volume of the balloon will be decreased to one half. It follows then, that taking the balloon to 66 feet, the pressure would compress the balloon to one third its original size, 99 feet would make it 1/4 etc. If we bring the balloon in the previous example back up to the surface, it would increase in size due to the lessening pressure until it reached the surface and returned to its one cubic foot size. This is because the air in the balloon is compressed from the pressure when submerged, but returns to its normal size and pressure when it returns to the surface. We will achieve the same result with an open container, such as an inverted bottle, as we do with a balloon. By inverting a bottle at the surface and descending with it, the pressure from the surrounding water will compress the air and the bottle will start to fill with water. Even with no air escaping, the container will be half full of water at a depth of 33 feet due to the pressure compressing the air to half its original volume. Along with the volume of air in the balloon or container, the surrounding pressure will affect the density of the air as well. Density, simply stated, is how close the air molecules are packed together. The air in the balloon or container at the surface is at its standard density, but when we descend to the 33-foot level where its volume is reduced to one half, the density has doubled. At 66 feet, the density has tripled. This is because the pressure has pushed the air molecules closer

together. Let's continue with this line of thinking and try an additional experiment. If we take our balloon and our open container down to 99 feet, we know that the density of air is four times what is was on the surface and the volume of air has been reduced to 1/4. Now at this depth, suppose we used a scuba tank and added air to the balloon until it returned to its original size. We will also blow air into the inverted container until it is completely full of air. We know the air at this depth is 4 times denser than at the surface. This means when we ascend with our balloon and container, the lessening pressure will make the air expand. This will have two different effects. The balloon will increase in size. It will attempt to grow to a size of 4 cubic feet by the time it hits the surface. If this is beyond the capability of the balloon, it will pop. The inverted container, however, will simply "bleed off" the expanding air that will harmlessly float away as bubbles. The main purpose of the proceeding material was to give you the theory behind the most important rule in scuba diving... "Never hold your breath!" Your lungs can act very much like a pair of balloons in your chest. As a breath hold diver (skin diver), if you fill your lungs with air at the surface, hold your breath, and dive to a depth of 33 feet, the surrounding pressure will compress your lungs to half of their original size. Upon ascending, they will return to normal size. If however, you descend to 33 feet and breath compressed air from a scuba tank, an ascent to the surface could cause you lungs to over expand and you could seriously injure yourself. This is easy to avoid, however, by simply not holding your breath which will let your lungs act like the open container in the preceding example, and you will simply "bleed off" the expanding air and maintain a normal lung capacity.

Barotrauma The weight of water causes an increase in air pressure in any material that can be compressed (lungs, wetsuit, etc.) in proportion to depth, the same way that atmosphere causes pressure at sea level. Injuries caused by such changes in air pressure are called as barotrauma. These injuries can be quite painful like ruptured ear drum or damage to sinuses. To avoid these damages several techniques are used, for example, mask is equalized by regular exhaling through nose and dry suit is equalized by inflation and deflation. Effects of Breathing High Pressure Gas

Decompression Sickness: Decompression sickness, also known as the bends, is due to the formation of gas bubbles in the body tissues. It could be avoided by slowly releasing the body water pressure at the end of dive to allow gases trapped inside the bloodstream break down and exit the body. Nitrogen Narcosis: Nitrogen narcosis is something very similar to the state of alcohol intoxication. It happens to divers who dive at depth and breath high pressure gas. It causes dizziness, anxiety, hallucinations and tunnel vision. Adding trimix or heliox in the breathing gas, reduces these effects. Oxygen Toxicity: The pressurized oxygen in breathing gas tank becomes toxic with increase in the pressure at depths exceeding a safe partial pressure. It directly affects the central nervous system, causing a seizure.

Loss of Body Heat An interesting fact about water relating to the conduction of heat is that water conducts heat from the diver that is 25 times better than air, and can lead to hypothermia even at mild temperatures. This is deadly but, can be avoided by wearing wetsuits or drysuits that provide thermal insulation. Another method to reduce heat loss in wetsuits is to trap a layer of water between divers body and wetsuit. This way heat gets trapped within the wetsuit. Currents When at the bottom in an ocean or sea, the peril of strong ocean currents drafting the diver along is always there. The diver may have to swim against the current to get back to the original position. Never get so mesmerized by the underwater beauties that you get lost because of current. A diver must always know about the current of the water where he is diving. Scuba diving provides mysteries of underwater but, at a cost. The cost is that you need to concentrate hard on diving rather than only enjoying the view. It requires great willpower and concentration. Always scuba dive with a trained and certified professional, and do not ever give scuba diving lessons to friends until you are certified, no matter how expert one must be in scuba diving.

Scuba diving is a form of underwater diving, wherein the divers use a scuba set to breathe, while exploring the fascinating world beneath the surface of the water. Around two-third of the planet is covered with water, hence, there is an ample scope for exploring this till now untouched world below the water surface. And scuba diving gives the opportunity to embark on this one-of-a-kind adventure.

Facts about Scuba Diving

The term SCUBA is an abbreviation for 'self contained breathing apparatus'. It is usually used to refer to the in-line open-circuit equipment which facilitates the process of inhaling the compressed air and eventually exhaling in into the water. In 1943, French seaman Jacques Cousteau invented the first self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), which was called the aqualung. Records suggest that Leonardo da Vinci had prepared a blueprint of such an equipment 300 years prior to the development of the aqualung. The wet suits worn by the scuba divers keeps them warm and also makes their body buoyant. Sometimes the divers wear fins on their feet, which help them to propel and change direction while traveling in the water. In more recent times, underwater vehicles have also been used for propelling. The regulator used by the underwater divers has 2 parts. The first part controls the pressure, while preventing the compressed air from shooting into the diver and inflating him. The second part is a valve which allows air to flow when the diver inhales, but automatically stops the flow when he exhales. Although scuba diving is considered to be one of the most dangerous activity in the world, millions of people successfully obtain scuba diving certifications around the world every year. The National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI), and the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) are the two premier organizations based in the United States which play a pivotal role in propagating safe scuba diving techniques. Scuba divers can't determine the direction of sound, as beneath the surface of water sound travels five times faster than it does in air. On land we just have a split second to determine the direction of a sound, but under water even a split second is not enough. Richard Presley holds the world record for the longest deep dive. He stayed underwater in a deep module for 69 days and 19 minutes, a feat he accomplished in 1992, at Florida, United States. A condition called nitrogen narcosis affects scuba divers who venture below the depth of 30 meters. This intoxicating condition, which initially leads to hallucinations and unconsciousness, can eventually result in death. A large number of deep sea divers have lost their lives trying to set the world record for deep sea diving. Therefore, even though the limit for recreational scuba diving is 130 meters, divers are strictly recommended to avoid going below 40 meters. Today, scuba diving is used in various fields, prominent ones being scientific, naval and recreational. Underwater tourism has received a major boost due to development of scuba

diving. These were some interesting facts about scuba diving. It has lately become one of the favorite recreational activity for many, and therefore a multi-million dollar industry. The rate at which its popularity is increasing, it can soon hit the billion or even trillion dollar mark. So if you haven't yet experienced this underwater thrill, now is the time. But with proper guidance.

Welcome and good luck

For over thirty years, underwater cinematography and photography have held a never ending fascination for me. It allowed me to share my experiences with others, to learn more about the underwater world and to maintain an accurate record for later reference. In this section I'd like to share my experiences with you, hoping that you won't make as many mistakes as I did. I have included the hard-to-get theory of light under water, tips, mechanical solutions that you can make in the home workshop, diving techniques and more. I am not ashamed to show my mistakes and of course, I am delighted to show my successes as well. Many books about underwater photography have appeared and disappeared, the earlier ones being the most thorough. Many articles devoted to underwater photography have been printed in dive magazines, yet the information you'll find in this section is hard or impossible to glean from elsewhere. My interest has always been in the biology and ecology of the sea. It is the reason why I have concentrated on taking pictures of organisms, how they live, what they do and how they all relate together. I have not been interested in photographing people under water because they do not live there. But a diver in the frame can contribute to the excitement of the moment and translate the viewer's feelings. I have endeavoured to make my photos look like the underwater world, with its transparency and depth, rather than resorting to effects caused by enlarged contrast, distortion and the like. It has also always been important to me to bring back good results for very little waste, which may explain why I have spent much effort in improving techniques, skills and my equipment. You may wish to take photos of what people do, their work or of fashion products, dive products or you may wish to document your own research. Whatever your motivation, you will find yourself in that ever changing optical medium, the sea water. You cannot escape the effects it has on your photography and you will need to equip yourself with the knowledge and skills to take good pictures inside this medium. You will need to be a good diver, able to manage precious resources such as body heat and air. You will dive with or without a buddy and carry an underwater camera that may give you more trouble than pleasure. You will need to gain expedition skills to go out to pristine natural places. You'll need to spend money and you'll need luck too. In this chapter we'll look at general issues - what you need to have, know, and do. Good luck, Floor Anthoni.

Diving skills
Photography is a creative activity exercised in a hostile, even potentially fatal environment. The American psychologist Maslow discovered that, in order to be creative, a number of human needs must be fulfilled first (see box below). One needs to be safe, well fed and socially recognised (loved, esteemed, valued). When diving, particularly the most important need, that of being and feeling safe, is easily upset. Humans' greatest fear is that of suffocating, because within minutes death will follow. A diver who does not feel safe, can never become creative. Divers who cannot hold their breath for a considerable amount of time will never feel safe. Divers who cannot snorkel-dive to ten metres or more will never be adequate divers. So learn breath-hold diving first and keep practising. Besides, almost half of your photo opportunities occur while snorkelling and for most photos on SCUBA, you'll need to hold your breath to minimise movement blur. Divers trained in warm and tranquil tropical seas will not have the skills needed in cold temperate seas with currents and waves. Here they need to wear a thick wetsuit with a heavy weight belt, and they need to master the art of buoyancy compensation. In these conditions it is important to adapt the weight on your weight belt to suit the occasion - whether you go deep, need to weigh yourself down in currents and whether you carry extra heavy batteries and so on. When pushing a camera with strobe and auxiliaries through the water, much water friction needs to be overcome and you need to be physically fit to do so. If you are a smoker, you will most likely never become an successful underwater photographer. If you fear the swimming back to the boat along the surface, you'll start with a serious handicap. You'll need to have the skills to avoid making dust - settling on the bottom and leaving it. You'll need to be happy to do all dive operations with one hand only, leaving the other free for the camera. You may need to change the hoses on your regulator around to do so and you may need a small side exhaust regulator for left- and right-handed use while allowing you to press your face closer to the camera (which also steadies it better). You may need to have a split lens mask with close-up lenses in the lower half, in order to be able to read the fine camera controls and settings.

The American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow (1908-1970) is best known for his selfactualisation theory of psychology, which argued that the primary goal of psychotherapy should be the acceptance and integration of the self (id). In his major works Motivation and personality (1954) and Toward a psychology of being (1962), Maslow argued that each individual's basic needs must be satisfied first before being able to be creative and selfactuated. He also established an order of importance between these needs. As each following need is satisfied, the next higher level in the emotional hierarchy dominates conscious fuctioning. Thus, people who lack food or shelter or who cannot feel themselves to be in a safe environment, are unable to express higher needs and to ultimately fully integrate the components of their personality. His proposed sequence of needs has often been criticised but as a concept has been widely accepted. Safety: immediate threats to life like suffocation, war, fights. Not feeling stressed. Food/water: a sufficient level of nutrition and having fed recently; not feeling hungry or thirsty. Esteem: belonging to a group/family, being loved and playing a role, being needed. Creativity: being creative, able to learn, to be a self-actualiser, playing.

Tip: Read Floor Anthoni's Snorkel course, here on this web site, to master the essentials.

Your buddy and diving alone

If you wish to take shots of a model, your buddy is very important. Besides, it is considered safer to dive with a buddy. But is your buddy really adding to your safety? Many serious photographers dive alone. They have trained themselves to cope with every kind of failure except for heart failure. They are the best divers around. Think about it. Your buddy can help you carry your gear, hold your lights under water, add interest to your shots and share your experience. But a buddy also brings twice the disturbance, dust and worries. If your buddy runs out of air, gets colder or more fatigued faster than you do, you've got a liability. Spend time training your buddy and don't change them too frequently. Otherwise it is better (and safer) to dive alone. The buddies and models of advanced photographers receive a lot of flak under water and often after the dive too. Somehow they never seem to do things right. Often the impatient photographer is blamed, but does your model know what skills she must have and what is expected of her? It is my experience that a model needs about two years of training and practice before becoming a true asset for every dive. So here is a list of what she needs to be able to do (I assume a female model here for ease of writing):

air consumption: the model must use her air at about the same rate as the photographer. To her delight she will be able to excel because her bodyweight is less, her lungs are smaller and she does not need to push a camera. Skip-breathing (see box below) is what all good photographers do to to extend their time under water. It also helps making less bubble noise. Likewise a buddy must learn this technique without getting a headache. fitness: fitness remains important but it depends on what you do. I've seen very unfit underwater photographers taking good photos with a lot of surface support. But this doesn't increase your chances. It is quite common to swim a couple of hundred metres with all gear on at the surface, to breath-hold dive to ten metres and take a photo. In general, your buddy must be matching your fitness. distance: how far should the distance between you and your buddy be? It depends. When scouting along, she can be leading up front, finding new subjects, but never above (or at least very carefully), because debris could rain down on your photo opportunity. Likewise, bubbles can rise up to spoil your photo. When a buddy moves lower down, her bottom time becomes shorter, which is undesirable. moving arms: most buddies have never unlearnt the habit of beating their arms for stability or by way of swimming or to remain buoyant. It has a devastating effect on your opportunities, as it scares fish witless. Never move your arms suddenly! Usually wrong buoyancy is the main cause. In many cases it takes a year to unlearn!!! buoyancy: whereas the photographer often has to steady himself down, the model or buddy should always be precisely trimmed. Wrong buoyancy leads to excessive use of arms and kicking dust up, or not being able to hold her pose. dust: dust is one of the worst problems. If the buddy swims ahead in a current, as suggested above, the photographer arrives in her dust, so in this situation she must stay behind him. Kicking up dust is usually caused by incorrect buoyancy. When rising up from the bottom, use your lungs and take a very deep breath, then with your fingers, push

yourself up from the bottom. Resume kicking only when completely free. Tip: small soft fins produce much less dust than long hard fins. currents: strong currents are not conducive to good photography but if there is no current at all, the dust and debris does not flow away. Plan your dive against the current, as this is also safer and makes the return easier. Most currents are related to the tides. Mark neap tides on your calendar for the best diving opportunities, because then the currents are minimal and also the water clearer. air bubbles: bubbles are unavoidable but when they disturb the subject, are a damn nuisance. Photographers must be able to hold their breath for prolonged times, in order to enhance their opportunities and not to shake the camera. They must also wait for a pause in the wave action. Of course the model does not know this, and breathes out at alll the wrong moments, bubbles hiding her face and eyes. So, time your breathing with the peak of the wave motion, and after the shot was taken. Models please watch the breathing of the photographer to get a clue. sign language: there is no photographers' sign language, and you will develop your own. Wherever you are doing serious shoots with models, go up to the surface to discuss the situation, so she'll understand what is expected. donning gear: because the photographer has so many things to do and check and wear, a buddy must be entirely self-reliant. She must don her own gear and get back on board without the photographer's help. Sorry. finding objects: while the photographer is spending much of his dive time peering through a small rectangle, the buddy is often free to go ahead and explore. Naturally she is the chosen one to find new subjects. Now she needs to tell the photographer, and wait and wait for the right moment when the shoot is done. Then she must be able to remember where this object was, and this very often fails. Thus a model must have good spatial orientation but it's a lot of fun. modelling: many girls like the kudos of being a model but underwater models better beware. o outfit: her outfit is the best, without blemishes and with the least of clutter. So it is her responsibility to put it on in such a way that the cluttering objects are tucked away and not half visible. o clear mask: a model's mask must be spotless, without steam inside or water under the nose or a bloody nose for that matter. But often she cannot see what the photographer sees, so be prepared to clean your mask under water, which can be unpleasant. o breath-hold diving: some of the most exciting photographs have a free-diving model without the clutter of tanks and BCDs and heavy belts. When free-diving, the model has trained herself to hold her breath for at least 30 seconds, such that she can swim to her position, the water closes overhead with the ripple pattern as if undisturbed, and enough time to make two photos. Phew! Then do it again and again. Should you have such a model, don't tell anyone because you'll lose her :) o playing: taking photos of models in situations requires a mix of direction and freedom. Sometimes the photographer's creative idea directs the shoot but then again, sometimes (and this can be very often) the model makes the picture and the photographer just grabs each opportunity. It can be very rewarding. We call it playing. Good models have some grace and elegance in the way they move, and when they play, wow!

fear: fear for the environment, unfamiliarity or political correctness (please don't touch anything) can diminish your opportunities considerably. Both photographer and model must have a good knowledge of the environment and what is really dangerous. camera care: camera care is entirely the photographer's responsibility. But so often a helping hand is on board with dry hands and can be the gopher for changing a film or lens. Often the buddy does not dive because the photographer is usually more motivated, and then it would be so nice if she could change a film or lens skilfully and safely.

What is skip-breathing and how do you do it safely? We all need to breathe to stay alive. When working hard, we need to breathe more than when sitting still and the body regulates this by taking deeper or more shallow breaths and also by the frequency we breathe. So why skip your breathing? Under water we breathe compressed air and at 10 metres depth this air has twice the concentration of oxygen at the surface (at 20m 3x, at 30m 4x etc.). The body's breathing regulator does not know this, and we keep breathing at normal rates, consuming less of the oxygen that is there. Our breathing regulator works on the amount of carbondioxide in our blood (not on the oxygen level), and having consumed the normal amount of oxygen, we end up with the normal amount of carbondioxide, prompting a new breath. So the extra oxygen is breathed out unused. Skip-breathing consists of consciously ignoring the urge to breathe in order to consume the remaining oxygen, which of course raises the amount of carbondioxide in the blood. Skipbreathing does not work well at the surface, but the deeper you dive, the better it works and saves air. It works best between 10 and 20m. The problem is that a raised carbondioxide level in the blood is poisonous, causing symptoms identical to a migraine when overdone. But it can't kill you even though a migraine may last all day. The symptoms are a head ache combined with neck cramp - discomforting but you won't need to stop diving for it. The good news is that your body can get used to raised levels of carbondioxide without causing a migraine. You just need to ease into it during an expedition. If you don't dive frequently, you won't be able to skip your breathing by much. When you do work under water or swim a lot, you can't gain much from skip-breathing. It is really for the very calm photographers and it works best when you move very little indeed. Being perfectly trimmed and swimming streamlined in a perfectly horizontal position is the secret. Being frugal with air brings another advantage. We now dive with 8 litre tanks (60 cuFt) which still give us a dive time of over an hour in most cases.

f031613: unstructured behaviour of the model, or playing f027512: longfinned eels (Anguilla dieffenbachii) showing can lead to surprising moments like befriending a wild no fear of the model in a freshwater stream. It takes much giant spotted black grouper (Epinephelus daemelii). It took patience to get to this situation, while time is running out.

3 hours to get here. 28mm lens.

16mm lens.

Assisted snorkelling with a pony tank I've missed some terrific opportunities with dolphins because I could not stay down long enough while also keeping up with them. The solution was simple: assisted snorkelling with a pony tank. A pony tank is a very small tank (2 litre, 15 cuFt) which does not impede snorkelling much. Attached is a regulator and contents gauge. You wear it while snorkelling, without BCD of course. When you need to stay longer than breath-holding allows, the air is there and you can complete your photo sequence, resulting in fabulous shallow water opportunities while degassing from a previous dive. It allows you to go deeper and stretch your bottom time, because you know that you can always reach the surface. It is particularly valuable for trimming a freediver's weight at, say 15m depth. This is where you become too heavy and begin sinking (depending on the thickness of your wetsuit). A single breath overcomes this problem and makes you weightless again, thereby saving much energy. So a pony tank extends your freediving considerably and thereby also your chances. Believe it or not, but this little tank can last for an hour. I use it a lot for spot dives to see what the environment is like. Such spot dives may take me to 40m depth where trimming by one's lungs only, becomes a problem (again, depending on the thickness of one's wetsuit). During such dives one should also bring one's dive computer. Spot dives typically consist of swimming a long distance with the least amount of friction. They last 20 minutes at most on a tank this small, but the distance covered can be substantial.

Camera housings
The era of building your own waterproof housing has perhaps come to an end. Yet knowing the technology of sealing will help you look after your gear and perhaps prevent that disastrous flooding (see tips and tricks chapter). Camera housings are now offered in all developed nations for competitive prices. You will have to make a trade-off between price and sophistication. This is not the place to guide you through the minefield of options. Many books are doing this and are becoming obsolete as rapidly as newer camera housings enter the market. Many good Internet sites exist to help you choose and buy. My advice is to buy the smallest housing (both for flash and camera) with the most controls (the dearest). You'll notice that the cost of the housing often exceeds that of your camera and lenses. A small housing weighs less above water, is easier to push through the water and is also easier to carry along. Your housing will have a selection of 'ports', the glass between your lens and the water. Wide angle lenses need dome ports whereas normal and tele lenses work fine through a flat port. Often plastic dome ports are not optically precise or they are not precisely placed, thus reducing the sharpness of your lens. Wide angle lenses for the Nikonos 3-5 underwater camera do not have this problem but this camera is rather primitive and no longer in production. It is very important that you can observe the whole frame of the viewfinder through your mask. 'Sport' finders are unacceptable for good photography. Likewise close-up frames such as used for Nikonos cameras are not really adequate. Make sure your housing allows you to mount both a quality macro lens and one 2 or 4 diopter close-up lens or filter. Please note that the Nikonos RS (Reflex System) is perhaps THE most sophisticated and easiest to use camera with the sharpest lenses ever made. I have been using this camera to full satisfaction since 2002. A full chapter will be devoted to this camera and how best to use it.

Managing resources
Every diver sooner or later learns to manage his vital resources. When running out, the dive must end. But photographers have to manage a few more. Here they are and some advice on how to stretch them to last longer.

Dive air: sooner or later you will have used up all the air in your tank. The deeper you go, the sooner. The era of sudden dive endings is over because of contents gauges and dive computers. You must have a computer, because this allows you to stay longer and go down or up as you like in your dive profile. It allows you to plan your dive under water. Although some dive institutions advise not to skip-breathe (holding one's breath), this is still a safe technique to extend your bottom time considerably. A good diver with a 12 litre tank (90 cuft) is able to stay at 5-10m depth for over two hours! A headache with neck pain (like a migraine) signals that you are overdoing it and you can adjust your technique accordingly. The first dives of an expedition are always the most sensitive to skip breathing, so get into it gradually. Air can be saved by not swimming fast and

particularly by compensating one's buoyancy precisely and frequently. Learn to become perfectly balanced.

Dive time: if your air hasn't run out, your dive time will, particularly during deep dives. You can extend your underwater time considerably by not using up all 'no stop' time at depth, but instead returning to the shallows earlier. Here you can also use up all safety air under 40bar/500psi. Body heat: the colder the water, the shorter your stay. The deeper you dive, the thinner your wetsuit becomes, and the more your inhalation air cools your lungs. You can extend your stay by wearing thick wetsuits but these require heavy weight belts. Most important is that your suit fits well and does not allow exchange of water. A hood comes next, then booties and finally gloves. Your hands are able to shut off circulation quite easily. For very cold conditions, use a drysuit but these are not a panacea. The air bubble within makes diving unpleasant and it affects many aspects of photography. Slow hypothermia: most diving results in acute hypothermia, characterised by feeling cold, followed by shivering. It is the safest form of hypothermia because it gives very clear unpleasant signals. What you need to watch out for is slow hypothermia, which can occur by staying wet for too long; standing in cold wind and so on. Make sure you recognise it because it can be a slow killer. Slow hypothermia does not give strong shivering but is first noticeable by feeling lacklustre. On cold days, make sure you get into dry clothes again with a jacket to protect from the wind. When your wetsuit is wet, while in a boat, you will suffer slow cooling until the wetsuit dries up from the outside. If you need to wear it, wear a wind jacket over the top. It makes an ENORMOUS difference. Fatigue: as you grow older or become unfit, fatigue sets in earlier. You'll miss out on the third dive of the day and give some night diving a miss. In order to make the most of your expedition, you'll need to be well prepared and trained beforehand. Don't indulge in excess alcohol during the trip, get good sleep and light meals. Let the doctor check if your hormonal levels are normal (Testosterone!). Note that some alcohol can be beneficial. When feeling very cold, particularly in feet and limbs, a small amount of liquor can help you get warm very much more quickly. Being fat: fat divers know that they are a greater risk to decompression because fatty tissue absorbs nitrogen gas in higher densities while releasing it more reluctantly, just as smokers know that their lungs could rupture more easily during ascent. But what is insufficiently known is that belly fat take space that would otherwise have been used for breathing. A wetsuit furthermore exerts pressure on the chest, and these two factors make that fat people run out of breath very quickly. They can seem fit and strong in nonaerobic exercise (such as lifting) but fail badly when air is needed in aerobic exercise such as swimming back to the boat in a current. You can't be fat as a good underwater photographer! alcohol and diving: the politically correct notion is that diving and drinking do not go together, but this is not strictly true. Sure, a booze-up may reduce your judgment and sense of responsibility, but divers routinely experience nitrogen narcosis to the equivalent of one drink for every ten metres of depth. So, what can be good about a drink and should we be dogmatic about it? o headaches: a headache at the end of a dive is so common that divers don't talk about it. Most headaches come from sinus problems. Being unable to let air into the sinuses, the tissues rupture and they fill with blood. Hence that bloody nose at

times. Of course you should have taken your Pseudoephedrine tablet before the dive, but did you know that half or a whole drink of carbonated alcohol (beer or fizzy wine) helps? It also helps against those migraine headaches from skipbeathing, but in both cases best when taken before diving. o seasickness: a single drink of alcohol helps to avert mild seasickness when taken well in advance. It is thought that the reason drunks swagger is their loss of a sense of balance. It is this same numbing of the balance organ that prevents seasickness. o warming up: the general idea is that alcohol should not be used to warm a patient suffering from hypothermia, because as the alcohol improves circulation, it also cools the warm heart with the cold blood from limbs, and the patient dies. But this is an extreme and hopeless case. For divers who have difficulty warming up after a dive, a toddy of brandy performs miracles while also warming their feet inside the sleeping bag. Photographic film: if you run out, you've had a good dive. If you have film left unexposed, you'll be faced with a dilemma: use it for the next dive or load a new film? I've seen a professional photographer for the National Geographic magazine take down over a dozen cameras during one dive, with the aid of a helper whose task it was to ready them and to place them at strategic points under water. This photographer would shoot some 500 frames during a single dive. It is much better to learn the skills of taking many successful photos with only little waste. You'll learn these in this course. Having two cameras, one for wide angle shots and one with a zoom lens, is definitely an advantage if you can afford it and have a buddy willing to carry one. Having patient surface support, allowing you to reload film, swap cameras and go diving again, is also a good solution. Preferably train someone who stays dry, to reload the film. Cameras are easily damaged by a single drop of salt water. Tip: use the type of towel cloth wrist cuffs used by tennis players to prevent water droplets from leaking into the camera while changing a film or lens.

Battery life: Practically everything runs on batteries these days. Movie makers run out of battery power very quickly. Make sure to be able to charge batteries on expedition. Keep a log of battery replacements in your various cameras (when was it that you replaced that battery?). Mark the date of replacement on the battery. Use only long-life lithium batteries. These are cheaper per unit of electricity and perform better too (more power in low temperatures and they deliver more current). Most important of all, learn to switch your gear off when not in use. Long-life batteries also require you to do fewer changes, reducing the chance of equipment flooding. My worst mistake on expedition is usually not switching cameras and strobes off.

The graph compares temperature performance of Lithium iron disulphide batteries with Alkaline manganese or 'standard' alkaline batteries. Although their capacity ratings do not differ very much, they do differ significantly performance wise. Whereas a standard AA alkaline battery is rated at about 2.5Ah, it can deliver this energy only when used in low current applications like transistor radios. Once current is demanded as required for recharging a strobe light, its capacity drops to half its nominal value. When the temperature furthermore drops to close to 0C, it performs at about a quarter of its rating. Here is where lithium batteries, with their very low internal resistance, rated at 2.7Ah, make an enormous difference. Whereas alkaline batteries degrade gradually, extending the recharge time from 4 to 10 seconds, lithium batteries die rather suddenly, extending recharge time from 4 to about 6 seconds, which can be a nuisance. Note that a D cell has about six times the capacity of an AA cell and a C cell about 3 times. Lithium batteries have exceptional shelf life of over ten years! It means that you can leave batteries in unused equipment without running the risk of them leaking and damaging it. It also means that their internal leakage is very low and that they retain their capacity for very long periods. They are excellent to take with you on expeditions.

Expedition skills
Many of your photos will be taken in far away places, often while out on a boat with very little comfort and facilities. Such photographic dive expeditions can become a treasure trove of opportunities or a sequence of unmitigated disasters. Here are some tips to enhance success.

Scaling up: if you are going on a two week expedition, make sure you have recently done a weekend expedition. It should have revealed the weaknesses in your equipment and yourself. If you are going to an extremely cold or warm place, make sure you have done something similar beforehand. Health: expeditions have the habit of wearing you down, gradually. Prepare yourself by starting fit and keeping yourself fit with exercises that can be done in a confined space (like yoga, push-ups, sit-ups). Treat the expedition as a training exercise and do not exert yourself on the first day, but rather build your programme up gradually, from day to day. Wounds and scratches are a serious handicap to diving. They heal slowly because of repeated salt water exposure, become inflamed and eventually prevent you from diving. Just be extra careful and carry several pairs of surgical gloves for those hand wounds.

Seasickness: getting seasick should never come as a surprise. You should long before have tested your susceptibility. Take those tablets when you think you need them. Can seasickness be cured? The literature denies this - once sick, always sick. But since I had my own boat, I have never been seasick again, so experience cures some people. Some boats make you more seasick than others. Slow, rolling motor vessels are the worst; sailing boats next, and catamarans the best. Diesel fumes and the smell of vomit are almost certain to make you seasick. If you can choose your ship, let seasickness be a consideration because it is a very serious and disabling condition. Nasal decongestion: most people suffer to some degree from blocked sinuses. It appears to be related to city life with its challenging fumes. Don't take your chances but use decongesting pills, particularly in the beginning of the expedition. The substance Pseudoephedrine is the stuff that helps, but nowadays you have to sign your life away to get it. Diving without head aches is just so nice! Very recently a new form of Pseudoephedrine has become more readily available, one that is not easily converted to the street drug P. Batteries: make sure you can charge those rechargeable batteries. How long is mains electricity available each day? Perhaps you need to have fast rechargers. Try to standardise the voltages you use, rather than carrying a dozen different types of battery chargers. Use long life lithium batteries only. In cold places you need twice the number of batteries because they perform worse. The most important expedition skill is just turning equipment off when not in use and never forgetting to do so. Before going to bed, check those switches again! Equipment rinsing: all photographic underwater equipment corrodes when exposed to concentrated salt water. If you have a facility to rinse your equipment with fresh water, then do so. Failing that, keep the gear moist and do not let it dry up because when the salt concentrates it becomes corrosive. Wrap it in a moist towel; keep it in a cool place; in a sealed box; out of the sun. Same for your dive gear. Contrary to popular opinion, fins,

masks and wetsuits do better when staying salty, so they do not need to be rinsed. Plan a big bucket of fresh water as necessary expedition equipment. Gently wipe your precious lenses dry after each rinse, otherwise their hard coatings will show spots. I use a bucket with 5 litres of fresh water for my cameras and this may last for five days before requiring to be refreshed. Give your regulator a daily dip too. Check lists: maintain check lists to jog your memory. They represent your accumulated expedition experience and give you peace of mind. Use someone else's check list if you have none. Don't forget that roll of paper tissues and some gaffer or ducting tape!

Better chances
Every good photo requires a stroke of luck because it would be impossible to control all circumstances. When taking natural photos of unco-operative subjects, luck becomes even more important. But it is possible and necessary to make luck strike more often. Learning from other people's experiences is one way (through books, clubs, magazines) but most you should learn from your own experiences. Make it a habit to analyse your pictures before tossing the bad ones in the waste bin. You should see gradual improvement as you improve your methods. Tallying my mistakes by the following categories helped me improve my techniques considerably:

Out of focus/ depth of field: photos should be sharply in focus where it matters. Do you need to guess distance settings? Do you need better glasses or an auto-focus camera? Do you need to use a faster film? Do you need to recalibrate your distance settings (for macros e.g.)? Did you shift the camera after it focused automatically? Movement blur: do you need to use a faster shutter speed or more flash light? Do you need to use a faster film? Do you need to use a tripod? Do you need to click at a better moment (the pause in wave movement, e.g.)? Do your hands shake? I use a small tripod whenever I can, except for macro photography. It does give the sharper images. Exposure: is the film under- or over exposed? Do you need to alter your strobe light intensity? Is the light optimally balanced for foreground and background? Do you need to use faster film? Do you need more bracketing? Do you need to use a more tolerant film? There's never enough light and every photo entails a compromise. Wrong moment: did you click at the wrong moment? What do you need to improve this? How can you anticipate the way a situation develops? Do you need more skills in handling animals or models? Are you synchronising with the wave motion? Are you too impatient? Are you too lacksadaisical? Are you clicking too soon or too late? Composition/framing: What is the reason you did not compose the image optimally? Do you have parallax problems? Can you see the image completely in the viewfinder? Does the viewfinder need calibrating? Did emotion make you blind? Do you need to brush up on theory? Are you too hurried? Colour/contrast: The quality of the light changes enormously from moment to moment, from shallows to depths and from one position to another. Are the colours right and the contrast optimal for the prevailing conditions? You may need to aim in a different direction. You may need to use colour correction filters. Are you using the right film? Help light: Did your strobe or other light source cause problems (scatter, bleaching, shadows)? Was it aimed correctly? Did it fill the way it was needed? How can you improve it? Does your buddy need to help? Do you need a modelling light attached to the strobe? Repetition: Some repetition is necessary for bracketing and other reasons but how many unnecessary repetitions did you shoot? Can you vary your angle or distance or aspect while repeating shots? Did you forget what shots you took before? Irrelevant: how many shots prove irrelevant because you would never be able to use the result? Did you just click away? Did you think about what to do with the photo later? Does the photo tell a story and what would be needed to make it do so? Experimental: Experimenting is necessary to improve skills, to test your methods and improvements and to just try surprising ways, but many fail. Did you learn from the experiment? How can you improve it next time? Can others learn from your experiment?

Did you do it in a systematical way? Can you do it again next time and include it in your portfolio of tricks? Good ones: the ones you wish to keep. They may have been marked in some of the categories above but do not need to be rejected as such.

Try to treat every photo as the one and only, last opportunity.

Analysing your failures I may sound a bit like a school master but the reality is that you will forget about your failures or not analyse them properly to learn from them. Have you studied the many questions above? Do you really know how to recognise them in your work? Don't be so sure. Cut this page out and keep it handy. You must be asking these questions all the time, even under water. Take a sheet of paper and draw a table with rows for each film and columns for each category above. For each frame of the film, tick one or more columns that apply. Do it for each film. A pattern will emerge, showing your wastefulness of resources (money + time + effort). You need to do something about it and change your ways. It taught me quickly that I needed a different kind of camera, another lens, change the strobe bracket, bring variation in bracketing my shots and much more.

Clouds, waves and visibility

Weather, waves and visibility have a decisive influence on your under water photography.

Clouds: clouds quickly diminish the quality and quantity of light under water. You may have to resort to close-up strobe-lit photography. In temperate seas the amount of light under water in winter may be three f-stops less than in summer, making winter shoots all but impossible. Blue skies create opportunities for wide angle lenses. Half overcast skies often introduce more light under water, particularly inside caves and archways and on the shaded sides of rock walls. Clouds provide soft lighting, often good for fish portraits in shallow water, using fast film. Waves: waves introduce water movement, sometimes creative for the cinematographer but for the still picture photographer they create extra problems. It may be necessary to strap extra weight on your belt or to dive deep. Perhaps use a faster film as well. Large waves are invariably damaging to equipment, particularly when boarding after the dive. Just give big waves a miss. Seek sheltered places. Waves stir up sediment and reduce visibility. Currents: under water life is richest in areas with sea currents but diving becomes more dangerous. Strap an extra weight on your belt to improve bottom stability. You may need that tripod too. Currents quickly carry away the dust stirred up and may be advantageous this way. Most currents are tidal, allowing only one dive per day on the high or low tide. Make sure you have alternative dive sites too. In some places the only way back is over the bottom back to the shore, as if doing a dive inside a deep cave, because you can't do a decompression stop or safety stop in a racing current. Be aware. Visibility: poor visibility invariably leads to poor pictures. Use wide angle lenses or resort to macro photography. In the shallows, poor visibility can be used very creatively to accentuate the sun rays penetrating the water, to shoot misty moods and to separate foreground from background.

Photographer or diver?
Is it better to be a diver who learns to take photos or a photographer who learns to dive? Obviously both skills are required and more. In practice, only the amateur photographers who learned to dive, became good under water photographers. But your prime interest must be photography. Ironically hardly any professional photographer has made the transition to the sea, perhaps because it would constitute a considerable loss of income. You should be familiar and capable of taking good pictures above water if you ever want to take good under water pictures. Under water photography is much more difficult than above but above water photography has been refined to a very high degree, which makes it hard to excel in. If you have never taken good photos before, don't expect to be able to take good photos under water. A snapshot on the land taken by an automatic camera may look great, but that same camera in an under water housing produces very poor under water pictures. The most difficult question to answer is: What makes a good photo? Eventually I narrowed this down to the following list of qualities:

Serve its purpose: many photos are good simply because they do the job. They are wanted. This is the most important quality but not necessarily for winning competitions. Technically pleasing: the technical quality (sharpness, composition, etc) must serve its purpose. A blurred image is not necessarily wrong. The technique used must serve a purpose, any purpose listed here. Best option at the time: shows the skill of the photographer. Can the image be improved upon? If one can, you have missed an opportunity. Element of surprise: an unusual situation, the right moment, an unusual angle, a technical trick. This is usually rated highly in competitions. Co-incidence of 2-3 themes: for example a leaf, with dew in the morning sun and a caterpillar gnawing it. Always look for the confluence of more than one idea and take the time for it; otherwise enact it. This is also rated highly in competitions. Tell a story: as above but it is the story that matters, not so much the photo. An illustration of an idea. Often judges and the public do not get the story, reason why this type of image does not rate highly. But in a book, accompanied by text, these photos are the most desirable ones of all. Colour: the gaudy colours of the underwater world are addictive, surprising and pleasing. Colour always wins over monotone. Spend more time on your most colourful subjects.

Transmitter or receiver? In the photo and film industry realising ideas and dreams is the mode. The shots are driven by an intense desire to create, to enact, to fake. It is the transmitter at work, sending out his ideas and pushing others to fall in line. While taking movies underwater, I had a couple of terribly unproductive years, and I did not understand why. What I was doing, was finding the finishing shots to complete a number of stories. I had my mind set and wanted nature to comply. I was diving as a transmitter, wanting my way, and as a result I did not see the opportunities that presented themselves. I was hopelessly unproductive because I had my receiver turned off. Now you know that you can't both talk and listen, and you also know that those who talk a lot,

are poor listeners, and visa-versa. You cannot transmit and also receive at the same time. What this means is that if you are out there to take photos of nature, you must have your transmitter turned off and be receptive to whatever opportunity that presents itself. I had to tell myself specifically that I didn't dive for film (but my camera was 100% on stand-by) but for fun. It was a hard lesson that I won't forget. Think about it.

Light is all you see

Taking pictures is all about light, how it interacts with substance and how our eyes perceive it. Why can we see three dimensions (depth) in a two dimensional (flat) image? Why do we see colour? How does colour arise? Why are some images more pleasing than others? There's obviously a lot of helpful theory to learn about light and photography, knowledge that I found extremely hard to obtain. Yet, in this course on under water photography I have to assume that you know it all or pretend that you don't need to know. One day, when pushed a little, I may put it all on Internet, because it did change my life profoundly and it may change yours likewise. You are supposed to know about the properties of light, film exposure, depth of field, composition, subject separation, saturation and contrast, use of filters, use of artificial light, cameras and lenses. Or do you?

Introduction
We live in an exciting era where old values appear to crumple. Knowledge changes rapidly, assisted by the flight of technology. It is hard to imagine that before the second world war, colour photography was rare and those using it regretted doing so. Their images no longer exist, faded by time. But the century old images recorded in silver, remained. When I started using colour in the sixties, I didn't know that even those images would fade to oblivion. Still many professionals and amateur photographers today, resent the way film suppliers pushed their products, while perfectly aware that they could not last the test of time. Even today it is impossible to get longevity data of any film on the market, although most film stocks have improved. Neither can one get longevity data for CDs and DVDs! Back in the sixties Kodak came out with Kodachrome, an emulsion without colours. The colours are added during development through a laborious process, known to Kodak alone. This transparency film is used by organisations such as National Geographic, who also take exceptional care in storing their photographs in cool, dry and dark archives. In this manner the film can be retained for over 300 years. Other slide films, in ordinary filing systems, last only a human's life time or less. But now we can save images electronically on CDs. The aluminium CDs we buy can perish through aluminium 'rot' but the gold 'write once' CDs could last forever. Once in electronic form, images can be cropped, cleaned up, colour and contrast corrected and sharpened. For under water photography such manipulations can be of enormous benefit. In this chapter we'll look at the suitability of various media you can choose and we'll also discuss the lenses you should use.

Large or small format?

In the beginning years of under water photography, the medium format (60mm square) was the preferred choice. Armed with Hasselblad and Rolleiflex cameras, our pioneers opened up the under water world. But these cameras were large, and suffered from a lack of depth of field (about four times worse than 35mm cameras). As film emulsions improved, the field was taken by the small format (35mm frame) cameras. Because under water photography is best in close-up, depth of field is very important. Resolution can be attained by using low speed film and longer exposure times or by resorting to negative film.

Slide, negative or digital?

At the moment there are three basic options to consider: slide, negative or digital. Slides and transparencies Transparencies are the professional's choice for delivering pictures to printers and publishers. Their advantages are obvious: what you see is what you get. The slide is both the original and the finished product. It can be shown in a viewer or a projector. Each slide is packaged on its own, can be manipulated and stored on its own. Slides have good colour rendition and sharpness. They look like the printed image and the printing industry knows how to handle them and turn them into colour plates. But slides also have their down side. Because they are the unique and finished product, they can easily be damaged or lost. Printers often remove slides from their frames and greasy fingerprints, and miniature scratches are often left behind. Although good copies can be made of slides, printers often demand the originals. Slides fade when used regularly in projection, so only copies should be shown. Slides have high contrast, desirable to blacken the dark parts for projection. They show the world not exactly the way it is, with brighter colours, deeper shadows but the public has become accustomed to this, often demanding the postcard look rather than reality, particularly for advertising. Because of its contrastiness, exposing slide film correctly is rather critical. Even half an f-stop (25% light intensity) can spoil the result. To cope, photographers take many repeats of the same shot with varying exposure settings ('bracketing'). When an artificial light source is used such as a strobe, the number of repeats becomes very high, resulting in high wastage, costs and time. For under water use, slide film is often disappointing. Under water one cannot reload films. One has only very few chances to shoot more than a few photos of the same subject in the same situation. Bracketing then becomes a hard liability. Negative film The colour saturation and sharpness of negative film has improved quite considerably in recent

years (1990s). It is the favourite choice for amateurs but also for wedding photographers who often can not bracket their shots, or re-do them. Prints made from negative film can be handled without the risk of damaging the original. But negatives need to be left in strips of four to eight frames. So when a printer needs the original, he receives a strip of several frames. Printers dislike negative film because the result may change and there is no visual original to compare the printed image with, unless the corrected print is supplied as well. For a photographic library or stock clearing house, negatives are unacceptable because of this. But for the private photographer, shooting negative film gives the best value. Negative film is very tolerant to exposure, producing good results within a three f-stop tolerance. Negative film has low and linear contrast and portrays the world the way it is, much more so than slide film does. Prints can be enhanced by reprinting them lighter or darker. Negative film has very fine grain which allows one to use faster films. For nature photography under water, shooting negative film is very rewarding. Now that photographic images can be saved, filed and traded in electronic form, negative film has lost its earlier disadvantages and is rapidly becoming more popular for the professional photographer who wants quick, reliable and cost-effective results.

A baby pink maomao is found sleeping in a safe place inside the giant Rikoriko cave at the Poor Knights Islands, New Zealand. Because the camera's aperture failed to narrow from f4 to f22, this photo was over exposed by 5 f-stops! Hardly discernible on the very black negative, it still produced this amazing image, with true colours. Film: Fuji NPH400 Lens: approximately 100mm Digital cameras Whereas progress in film emulsion technology has been slow, progress in electronic imaging has been rapid. Cameras now claim as many as 6 million pixels per image (a scanned 35mm Kodak Photo-CD image has 3000x2000 = 6 million pixels, compressed to some 6MB, about 80 lines per mm, the resolution of most slide films) Digital images show the result immediately, allowing for on-the-spot improvements to lighting, exposure and even contrast. Digital cameras are more sensitive, being able to take pictures in low light conditions. The CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) is small, allowing for short focal lenses with vastly superior depth of field characteristics. Very recent digital cameras now provide resolutions comparable to the 35mm frame. For the amateur under water photographer who wants immediate results that can be reproduced professionally up to sizes of 100mm across, the digital camera is the solution. In the past few

years digital video has stormed the world, providing superior pictures that can be obtained with ease. The digital colours of 3-CCD cameras are 'additive' as opposed to the 'subtractive' colours of slides and negatives, making a whole new range of 'fluorescing' intensive colours available. Unfortunately these can not be rendered in print. Most still digital cameras, however, use a single CCD colour technique which renders colours subtractive. The most standard method of saving the image, is in the standardised sRGB (scanner-Red-Green-Blue) computer format, which prints beautifully, the way one sees it on the computer screen. The digital image is made up of (square) pixels, each containing three colours, red, blue and green, much the way a television image is composed. Each colour can assume only discrete values, ranging from 0 to 255. At mid-exposure of 150 units, a picture looks rather dark whereas a one stop over exposure (2 times) at this point would overexpose the image to 300 units, which is 'clipped' not to exceed the value of 255. So working with a digital pictures can be even more critical than working with slides. Fortunately, the high quality end of the digital cameras produce images with 10 or even 12 bits colour depth, thereby extending the range considerably (from 255 steps to 4096). But the JPEG compressed file format has only 8 bit precision.

Slide films compared

The following drawing may help to understand how light, falling on the emulsion, results in density (blackness). To the left is the real world with objects of varying intensity. The checkered scale is in f-stops, each square representing a factor of two (one f-stop). Both horizontal and vertical axes are thus logarithmic, corresponding to how our eyes experience light.

The art of exposing correctly is to dim the intensity of the real world, to that required by the film, and we do so by means of shutter speed and aperture. The diagram depicts a typical slide film with a range of 8-9 f-stops in density. Just to put this scale in perspective, prints in books have a density range of only 4 f-stops (1:16); prints in newspapers only 3 f-stops (1:8) and slides projected in a dark room 6 f-stops (1:64). So the scale at bottom right runs over 6 f-stops from white to black. But because of the contrastiness of the slide film, this corresponds to only 4 fstops in the real world (which covers 10 f-stops from direct sunlight to deep shade), reason why exposure of slide film is highly critical. This is much less so for negative film. But the situation is even worse because the colours in the highlights are truly bleached, missing colour information, AND those in the shadows are mixed with black, which also reduces the amount of colour information. To sum it all up, colour slides provide only 3 f-stops of true colour, which explains why they are so difficult to expose right. In the diagram, the 1:1 contrast line has been dashed. A film with this density curve would be ideal as a duplicating film to make copies of slides. A steeper incline means less contrast (soft film) whereas a flatter line means more contrast (hard film). As you see, most slide films are soft

in their highlights but contrasty in their shadows. This explains why correcting an under exposed slide by duping (duplicating), results in very high contrast. In the diagram below, a number of typical slide films of the 1980s are compared. As you can see, there are distinct differences between them, reason enough for careful selection. Notice how Ektachrome 100 follows a smooth soft density curve. It has been the preferred film for under water photography for many years. As far as negative film is concerned, a similar comparison can be drawn. But the result depends also on the qualities of the print material used.

When plotting the latest offerings in slide film on this chart, remember that suppliers' technical data sheets show density on the vertical axis and exposure on the horizontal axis. Note that the fstop scale is missing on the technical data sheets which show optical densities (0,1,2,3) instead. One optical density is a reduction in light of 90% (factor 0.1 or 1:10). So which film do you choose? One advice is to stick to only one film type and to learn to work with it. But differences in film can be used to advantage. For instance, tele lenses 'dilute' the light, causing contrast-poor images with watered-down colours. Use a high contrast film to counteract it. Likewise, wide angle lenses 'concentrate' the light, resulting in contrasty, over saturated images. Use a low contrast film to balance this.

Most under water photographers are obsessed with sharpness of detail, resorting to low speed fine grain film. But in doing so they cannot capture natural light and they waste much film on movement blur, poor depth of field and so on. Adapt your film type to how much light is available (much in the tropics, little in temperate seas) and accept graininess as part of the tradeoff. For macro photography where enough artificial light is available, go for the finest film if you like. My choice has been overwhelmingly for negative film because its softness captures the under water atmosphere best. It is tolerant to exposure and gives me a large number of good results. I am mainly using Fuji REALA (100ASA) which has good colour separation and density but also very fine grain. For higher speed, I used the Fuji SUPERIA range of films, of which the 200 and 400 ASA films stand out by their sharpness, colour and fine grain. Note that the SUPERIA 100 is much grainier than the REALA film. Recently I have been push-developing Reala 100ASA to 400 ASA with fine grain results but increased contrast. After digital scanning this option gives me the best results: both finest grain AND finest colour reproduction. Note that the most recent batches of Fuji Superia films now also contain a fourth colour layer, like Reala 100. This new technology reproduces fine colour nuances much better than any other film on the market.

My Mistakes Previously I was using the FUJI NPH400 film, which gave nice looking prints, as the print material was well adapted to its characteristics. But since I have my NIKON Coolscan 4ED negative/positive scanner, I gained close insight in the graininess and other aspects of this film. It allowed me to compare other brands and types of film with precision. This made me choose the FUJI REALA 100 ASA film, because it is far superior to others. Unfortunately, it is made in 100 ASA only, and for higher speeds I now have it push-processed to 400ASA. That gives me the added advantage of having only one type of film on expeditions. What was wrong about NPH400, is that it is a portrait film. In portraiture, there is little contrast, compared to landscape photography. So the film was designed to be soft and underexposed. In addition it desensitised the blue component to achieve nice skin tones. These characteristics are all unsuitable for the underwater world. Before I had my own scanner, I submitted my films to a professional KODAK scanner, and these results were superior to those of other scanners I have seen. However, the Coolscan4ED with 4000 pixels resolution, and excellent software, allows me to achieve far better results (it is not easy though). In all, the combination of a super fine grain negative film and a high quality scanner, now beats slide film hands down in all respects. See the Kermadecs photo library for examples. It produces a very high rate of return, and complete control over post-processing on the computer. In order to save costs, and to get exactly what I wanted, I constructed my own underwater housing for a NIKON F601 with macro, zoom and wide angle lenses and lens ports. I also used a Nikonos 5 with 16mm Sea&Sea wide angle lens. However, in the end I was not satisfied with the lack of sharpness, and distortion towards the edges of the image. A boating accident with loss of all gear, fortuitously enabled me to lay my hands on a used Nikonos RS camera with 50, 28 and 13mm lenses. These lenses are truly sharp and a delight to use. The benefits of the RS system cannot be overstated. There is just no comparison.

Some notes on film type, exposure and contrast Transparency slide film was developed for slide projection in a dark room. Its contrast has been adjusted for this purpose, resulting in a colourful but contrasty image with a deep black background. Although pleasing to the eye, this image is not a true reflection of the real world. Many photographers like colour contrast so much that they exaggerate it further by pushdeveloping (underexposing and overdeveloping). So why this obsession with high contrast? In order to find an answer to this question, remember that the registration of colour in slides and negatives is by the process of subtraction. A red dye blocks the red light, while letting other colours pass. The colour orange is obtained by blocking both the red and yellow wavelengths. Remember also that the colours on film and in print are not true reflections of the rich colour scales in nature. Colour photography is based on the perception of the human eye, which is sensitive to three colours only (red, green and blue). By capturing only these three colours, the eye is fooled in believing that we have captured the full colour image, but this is not true. Only human eyes see similarity between a photo and the real world. In each of the steps in the process of capturing colour, some of its intensity (chroma) is lost, but this can be made good by increasing contrast. In this age of electronic images, colour intensity can be enhanced electronically, reason why digital cameras can produce very colourful images. Computer-scanned negative film can likewise be colour-enhanced, resulting in colourful images with any level of contrast. Such images better resemble the real world. A slide photographer is hampered by the shape of the contrast curve of his film. In the highlights, it gives soft colours, but in the low lights, it becomes quite contrasty. For optimal colour rendition, the mid tones are used, resulting in rather dark images and a reduced exposure range. For instance, a colour consisting of 80% red and 20% blue, needs at least 3 fstops to reproduce faithfully. Overexpose it and the red component bleaches out, shifting the colour towards blue. Underexpose it, and the blue component is suppressed disproportionately, shifting the colour to red. By comparison, a negative film has essentially a linear exposure-density curve, enabling it to capture the real world more faithfully, and with wider margins of tolerance. When scanned electronically, the image can then be adjusted to suit a variety of uses. But when printed on photographic paper, contrast is again enhanced (by the photographic paper) to achieve contrast and colour. The main problem with negative film is that true colour is difficult to achieve, because negative film and print film are often badly matched and commercial printing machines automatically make colour adjustments, which are often incorrect. However, with the help of a negative scanner, negative film yields beautiful and faithful images, particularly when printed by computer printers. Although a film's graininess is fixed for slide films, it is variable for negative films. Underexpose it, and large islands of emulsion will form. To keep the grain fine, negative film must be overexposed slightly, and this means an extra f-stop when using wide angle lenses which look at the bright sky as well as the dark deep. Despite tremendous progress, colour technology has remained full of frustrations from the capturing of the image to its reproduction in print. Film manufacturers sell their products based on hype, often hiding technical specifications. One would have expected to find all technical data sheets on Internet, but this is not so. Often datasheets of new films are a copy of some old data sheet. Manufacturers are also not clear about the purpose of the film. Some films have been 'blue-desensitised' to 'better reproduce' (flattering) skin colours or to please underwater photographers. Other films have been tinkered with to produce 'acceptable' results in both outside and inside lighting situations. But users can be finicky too. If ever the ideal film arrived, pure in colour and fine in grain, many would find it 'too ordinary', 'not gutsy', 'characterizes', 'unflattering' and so on. Open any issue of National Geographic magazine to see what the world does NOT look like.

Lens types
Camera lenses are available in a continuum of focal lengths from 16mm to over 100mm (for 35mm cameras). But the practical range for under water is 13mm to 100mm. The super wide angle 13mm lens has good depth of field but is not able to take fish portraits. For sharp macro photography often a 100mm lens is used. The table compares the properties of wide, medium and tele -angled lenses. In general, the 13-20mm lens is for people, large animals and seascapes. The medium angle lens is often a 28-80mm zoom lens, most suitable for fish photography and close-ups of people. The tele lens is often 60-100mm and is good for macro photography and detailed fish portraits or small animals. The wide angle lens distorts the real world as if there is more space. Objects seem farther away. It creates a lot of emptiness and should be used with care. By contrast, the tele lens makes objects seem stacked closer together. Both lenses introduce new creative possibilities and surprises. So what is the work-horse of lenses? It depends what you are after. In general the super wide angle lens (13-16mm) is difficult to use although it gives surprising results. You have to combine it with a super-wide strobe light and long strobe arms. The lens looks at the sky and at your fins all at the same time, introducing very high contrast. To counteract this contrast amounts to a fine art. But if you want to photograph reflections in the surface, the snell's circle, cathedral light, models and sea mammals you can't do without it. The medium focal lenses of 28-35mm tend to be good work-horse lenses, but for some reason (price?) they do not have a wide focusing range. I find the 50mm macro lens also very productive because it allows one to keep some distance from fish and without changing lens, focus down to 15cm.

Lenses of various camera systems compared. Focal lengths in mm. 6 x 6 cm 1000 500 240 120 35 mm 400 200 100 50 16mm 120 60 30 15 Super8 65 35 17 8.5

85 65 60 35

35 28 24 15

10 8.5 7 4.5

6 4.5 4 2.5

A note on macro photography The macro tele lens with or without close-up attachment lenses, places the camera at a sufficient distance from the object to allow the strobe light in. A macro lens is able to focus over a range of 5 diopters (from infinity to 20cm), whereas a standard lens would range over 2 diopters (from infinity to 50cm). With a closeup attachment lens of 2 diopters, the focal range would reach from 50cm to 14cm for the macro lens and from 50 to 25cm for the standard lens. As far as depth of field goes, it would be better to use a medium angle lens (35-28mm) with extension tubes, such as offered for the Nikonos cameras. A 28mm lens has 16 times the depth of field of a 100mm lens but would need to be placed very close to the subject. Note that the Nikonos lenses are corrected for the frontglass effect, and deliver very sharp images under water (but less so above).

Flat port and dome port

A port which is as flat as the front glass of a dive mask causes the same kind of distortion that makes all objects seem bigger and closer than they are. In fact, 30% bigger. It is interesting to note that our brains see this in three directions (1.3 x 1.3 x 1.3 = 2.2) and estimates a fish to be twice its weight. For the photographer the apparent image distance is quite confusing to estimate because, again our brains get used to the situation. But auto-focus cameras will always focus correctly. One immediate effect of the flat port is that it reduces the opening angle of the lens, turning a 38mm lens into a 50mm lens and so on, which in turn reduces depth of field by some 60% (double the effect). The flat front glass works somewhat like a lens, simply because on the one side is an optically denser medium (water), but it does not have the precision of a lens. For instance, it does not change the distance to infinity. As light rays enter through the glass on a larger angle, they do not exactly appear to come from the apparent image, causing a blurring distortion and rainbow coloured edges. This distortion starts to become noticeable for lenses with less than 35mm focal length. Thus 20mm and 15mm lenses cannot be housed behind a flat port. Here is where the curved dome port comes in. The frontglass effect is very noticeable, even in 50mm and 100mm lenses, when pursuing high quality photography, no matter the quality of your lenses! It is worst for close-up photography and less noticeable further away from the glass. When taking photos through an aquarium window, it is particularly annoying. Only one manufacturer makes lenses that are corrected for the frontglass distortion: NIKON. All Nikonos underwater lenses have such correction, and they are the sharpest lenses one can use under water. The Nikonos RS with its automatic focusing and large range, is also very suitable for aquarium photography.

The dome port places a perfectly spherical glass in front of the lens at the precise distance of the virtual centre of the lens (which may not be the same as the lense's focal length). The aperture is supposed to sit in this centre so that it will never project itself onto the film. The idea of the dome port is that light rays pass through perpendicularly, thus avoiding the distortion associated with flat ports. In practice this is not entirely true because the lens may move forward and backward while focusing and many dome ports are not very precise. The best dome port is the one that is part of the lens as is the case with the Nikonos wide angle lenses (Nikonos 5 and Nikonos RS). These are noticeably sharper. A side effect of the dome port is that it introduces a negative water lens in front of the camera, which makes objects appear further away and which requires an equally strong positive correcting lens on the inside of the dome. The strength of this lens depends on the curvature of the dome and is often around 3 diopters. Note that without it, most lenses would not be able to focus at all. The correcting lens can be placed in front or behind, between lens and film. But please note that a 13mm fisheye is not just a 13mm lens in front of the film, because this would leave no space for the mirror. Instead, the lens is placed at the normal 50mm distance and additional optics convert it to behave like a 50mm one on the film side, and 13mm on the water side. Instead of a 3 diopter lens on the film side, you need one of much less strength (3/4 diopter). As a point of interest it should be mentioned that the technique of taking half under and half above water shots, the part of the dome above water needs no correction whereas the part under water does. For such photos a special half lens is placed in front of the camera together with half a neutral density filter to correct for the brighter top half, by 1-2 f-stops. This half lens could also be placed behind the lens, between lens and film. Note that the Nikonos 13mm wide angle lens cannot be corrected this way unless a negative correcting lens is used between lens and film. With this in place, the lens is fabulously sharp above water (See Nikonos chapter).

Rebikoff-Ivanoff correction lens

Demitri Rebikoff was one of the pioneers in underwater photographic equipment in the era 1940-1980. He designed an underwater correction lens that is also a wide angle converter, based on an inverted telescope. Because it does not change the camera's focus, it is said to be a-focal. As shown in the diagram, this correction lens consists of a negative lens as port and a flat positive lens placed 30mm further towards the camera. The lens can be put together from the parts supplied by a technician for eye glasses. It has a number of attractive advantages, not the least that it can be used both above and under water. It is also used as a 'wet-mate' underwater attachment. The Rebikoff 'port' is often used for underwater television cameras, but it is disappointing for still cameras, and cannot match the sharpness of the Nikonos lenses. .

Digital image manipulation

Present-day Pentium computers have brought the digital editing studio in the hands of the amateur. With photo editing software such as Photoshop and Corel Photopaint, your photographs can be tidied up and cut-and-pasted into collages.

Scanning: negative and film positive scanners are still dear if you need good quality. Professionally scanned images using the Kodak Photo-CD method, cost about NZ$4 each and about 100 images can be stored on a single CD. This is well worth your best shots but may not be affordable for all the photos you wish to keep. For good negative scans, this is the best method, unless you can afford a high quality scanner yourself. But remember that no special care is taken to produce the best results. Cropping and re-sampling: images can be cropped accurately and re-sampled to the resolution required (about 100 dpi for newsprint and 200 dpi for magazines to 300 dpi for art magazines. Cleaning up: blemishes such as scratches, dirt and scatter can be removed effectively. Exposure and colour cast can be corrected. Light can be introduced where inadequately lit. Grain removal and sharpening: photographic graininess can be removed by various blurring techniques and the image can be sharpened to correct for motion blur and lens imperfections. Colour enhancement: overall colour cast can be corrected like a photographic filter applied after-the-fact. Colour intensity can be enhanced or reduced to match reality or to achieve an artistic effect. Other effects: a large array of special effects is available to achieve artistic effects. Trading and sending: images can be compressed up to 10 times (in JPEG format)

without visibly losing quality. They can be sent and traded by e-mail. Printing: images can be sent to colour copy companies that have their copiers interfaced with the computer and printed in all sizes up to wall-size. Storing: images stored on gold write-once CDs (CDRs) should not deteriorate with time. The medium offers very compact storage (about 100-200 images per CD).

Diver down flag From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search

Diver Down flag A diver down flag, or scuba flag, is a flag used on the water to indicate that there is a diver below. It is red with a white stripe from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, and was designed and introduced in 1956 by Ted Nixon of U.S. Divers, from an idea of Navy veteran Denzel James Dockery.[1][2] It can be placed on a boat or on a surface marker buoy. Practice about this choice of flag is not uniform worldwide. In some countries, the practice is to use the Signal flag ALFA/ALPHA instead.

Purpose It is used to notify to any boats to steer clear for the safety of the diver. The use of this flag is required by law or regulation in many US states and Canada,[3] as well in several other countries in the world (eg. Italy).[4] Usually the regulations require divers to display the flag and to stay within a specified distance of it when they are near the surface. As well there is often a larger zone around the flag where no boats are allowed to pass. Some states also prohibit the display of this flag when there is no diver in water. Other uses Today the red and white flag is so strictly associated with scuba diving that it is also used to indicate a place where there are services for divers, for example stores selling or renting diving equipment or scuba service stations. It may be seen on the windows or bumpers of cars belonging to divers.

Signal flag ALFA/ALPHA

The "Alpha" or "Alfa" flag, meaning: "I have a diver down; keep well clear at slow speed" As a code signal the International maritime signal flags A (letter ALFA/ALPHA) has the meaning of "I have a diver down; keep well clear at slow speed",[5] used to indicate the presence of a diver in the water, and is more commonly employed in Europe and the British Commonwealth, including countries such as United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Kenya. It also used by Russian Navy for the same purpose. A rigid replica of the 'A' flag is required to be displayed by any vessel engaged in diving operations, when restricted in her ability to maneuver, if the size of the vessel makes it impractical to display the shapes and lights required by the International Rules for Prevention of Collisions at Sea (IRPCS) Rule 27.[6][7] Although the presence of the 'A' flag may afford some protection for divers in the vicinity of the vessel displaying the flag, the intention of the rigid replica required by IRPCS Rule 27 (e) is to warn other vessels of the danger of collision. This marks a distinction between the 'A' flag and the red and white diver down flag.[8]