If you
own a Reef Master underwater camera you already know that this is a camera
with limited capability. Since it has a fixed focus of 4 foot to infinity,
you cannot take pictures closer than 4 feet without the $40 closeup lens.
The closeup lens, which can be installed and removed underwater, allows you
to take pictures in a distance of 2-4 feet. This is also the best range of
the built in flash so not having the closeup lens makes the camera somewhat
of a waste.
What would be ideal is having a way to take pictures even closer. I have devised a usable way to take pictures down to 1 foot. It involves adding other lenses to the camera.
But first some other improvements need to be done to the camera. Number one
is making sure the camera body fits in the water proof housing so that the
lens sits right up against the housing. I did this by shimming the back of
the camera with strips of velcro. You will need two soft pieces of VELvet
and one piece of CROchet of equal size say one inch. Take one piece of the
soft Velvet and apply it inside the housing directly opposite the lens port
in the housing. Take the remaining pieces of velcro and stick them together
glue to glue. Then apply glued together pieces to the piece mounted in the
housing (crochet to velvet silly). This will shim the camera in the housing
and the soft velvet is a soft surface against the camera. If you have winding
problems at depth you will have to remove some of the velcro. In either case,
make sure to hold the camera lens-down when closing the housing so that the
camera is as close as possible to the housing
port.
The
second modification is removal of the rubber armour around the housing's
lens port. The armour wraps up and over the edges of the port. Use a razor
blade to cut just enough so that the rubber is flush with the top of the
port. Now take the close up lens and install it on the camera. You will notice
that the close up lens doesn't sit straight because the armour from the small
half of the housing interferes. Trace a line around the lens on the armour
with a ballpoint and then remove the excess rubber. The purpose of these
two modifications is to decrease the distance between all the lenses involved
and thereby help prevent black halos on the pictures. You will still get
a little on some pictures. I also stuck a piece of zip-tie between the rubber
and the housing so that the snap-on lens would stay on better.
Now we can talk about the extra lenses. First some technical information.
The close up lens provided with the Reef Master is simply a color corrected
+3 filter housed on a 37mm mount (shown on the right in the picture below).
This mount snaps on to the camera. Close up lenses/filters, though not common,
can be found at most good camera stores. Usually they come in packs of three.
A +1, +2 and +4 are a common set and are usually on 49mm or 52mm threads.
See
http://www.cameraworld.com. 52mm
is the most common and these are what fit on most SLR lenses.
In addition you will need an adaptor ring that steps from 37mm up to 52mm.
I drilled six 5/64" holes into the adaptor ring to allow water/pressure to
flood in/out. YOU MUST DRILL THESE HOLES TO ALLOW THE LENSES TO FLOOD. Be
careful to drill the holes far enough away from both the inside and outside
threads in the adaptor. The holes do no good if they are obscured when
everything is put together. Take a little silicone o-ring grease and apply
it to all threads. Screw the +4 lens to the adaptor and then this assembly
to the +3 Reef Master lens.
You
now have a filtered +7 closeup lens that focuses from 16" up to a couple
of feet. This a distance close enough to take a snap shot of decompression
table and be able to read most of it. You can actually go to 14" but it gets
a little blurry. Adding the +1 on top focuses down to 14" (+8 total). Adding
the +2 instead will go down to 12" (+9 total), however adding either the
+1 or +2 cuts considerable light and must also be done under water so that
everything is flooded. I recommend using only one lens at a time on the adaptor.
Here are some pictures taken with the camera on a recent trip to Cozumel.
All pictures were taken using Elitechrome 200. They were converted from slide
to print using slide (reversal) paper and scanned at 600 dpi.
Thereafter, they were reduced to 10% size to fit on the web page. Therefore
what you see here is not as good as the original slide; especially if your
video screen is not set for True-color. All pictures were taken with
the +7 setup at a distance under 2 feet, except the Grouper which was taken
with no lenses attached. The Eel, Coral Fan, Gray Angel and Red Sponge with
Starfish were taken at night. In some of the pictures you can see a flash
halo in the upper left corner. I haven't, as yet, figured a way to solve
this. Close up pictures take careful framing. Unfortunately I didn't get
the entire sponge in the picture. Hey, it was at night with a camera in one
hand, dive light in the other and in a strong current. I almost didn't get
it at
all.
