Underwater Photography Logistics Course

Preparing and maintaining underwater photography equipment is time-consuming when done properly: we have to fiddle with a housing, dome ports, flat ports, strobes, arms, clamps and too many o-rings! Yet, this is how you ensure that you will be able to take photos during the next dives, and that your gear will keep performing in the long run.

In this Course, you will learn how to properly prepare your gear before a dive, what to do in between dives and how to maintain your equipment after diving. Let’s look at the content of the Course’s 3 lessons in more details.

First things first, the Gear Preparation lesson covers every step which your gear assembly routine should include, covering the most complete underwater photography setups (camera, housing, multiple lights, lighting accessories, arms and clamps). You will learn to assemble these items in 7 steps, and at each step I will show you the gestures and tools I use. For example, you will see me demonstrating how to safely take an o-ring out of its groove, how to inspect it, clean it and lubricate it. As I demonstrate those skills, I will also explain what’s the worst that could happen, if you were to skip some of these steps, based on 15 years of personal experience (and lots of mistakes in the early years…). I realise there is a lot of steps to remember, so you will get access to a downloadable checklist that you can use until this becomes second nature.

Next, there is a lesson on Maintenance and Servicing, where I explain the things you need to when you finish diving, to keep your housing, flat ports, dome ports and strobes in working order. I will make recommendations on how to effectively rinse your underwater photography equipment, and what to do after rinsing. If you follow these recommendations to the letter, chances are that you won’t need to get your housing serviced, despite hundreds of dives. Yet, this lesson covers servicing too (for housings and more), and concludes with a talk on o-rings logistics (how to minimise risk of damage, how often do you really need to replace them, and spares strategy). Again, I will share my experience and spell-out the risks involved, if you skip some of the things I show and explain.

Sooner or later, you will find yourself in dive trips or liveaboards where you simply don’t have enough time to properly maintain and assemble your underwater photo equipment, in between dives. This is why there is a third lesson which covers adapted logistics for Consecutive Diving. I will give you tips on how to save time, and spell out which steps you can safely skip when you are in the middle of a trip. I want to emphasise that these simplified logistics must be the exception rather than the norm, and you will need to go through all the Maintenance steps recommended earlier, at the end of such dive trip.

Because of the very content of this course, where you can watch me doing time-consuming tasks such as cleaning an o-ring, you will find that the pace is slower and the lessons longer, compared to other Courses of The Underwater Club. However, you will there are chapters within each video, so feel free to jump directly to the parts that interest you most.

Enjoy the Underwater Photography Logistics Course!