Remote underwater camera

I had an idea recently, while observing steelhead trout jump up a waterfall, that it would be cool to put a camera in the water and capture some images from a unique perspective. Usually in this situation, one simply puts a camera in a marine housing and gets in the water to snap a few shots.

However, the water was too swift and too shallow for this to work, and the presence of a person in the water would likely scare the fish off for a quite a while.

My idea was to put a camera in a water proof box on an extension arm with a video feed from the viewfinder of the camera and a remote hand control to trigger the camera. In this manner I could observe the video screen and snap the camera whenever a fish came into view. Sounds like a solid idea to me. Does anyone make such a contraption? No.

So I built my own. And it works!



A local fish hatchery let me test it out in a pool with rainbow trout fry. Easy targets for sure, but I simply wanted to test the function of the camera and see if everything worked. I could clearly observe the fish in the camera viewfinder, and easily trigger the shutter when a good shot happened. Cool!



I am excited to have this interesting tool in my bag of tricks.