Photo Durham Logo - Link to Home Page

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

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!

31907Rf-7 copy

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!

31907Rf-6 copy

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

31907Rf-16 copy

3 comments:

Bpaul said...

Really digging your posts and your pictures. I'm finding a lot of great blogs lately and now you are on the list.

Keep on keepin' on you have another patron :-)

OregonWild said...

Thanks bpaul

I appreciate the positive comments very much!

MD

Vid said...

Very nice!
Do you trigger the camera remotely or by cord? Do you have maybe a picture of this setup? :)

Subscribe in a reader

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Details About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
Husband, Father, Student Of Natural History, Photographer