Underwater photos ~ Alphabe- Thursday

This week’s letter is ‘U‘ for

~ underwater photos ~

To be honest, before deciding on underwater photos, I had a pretty difficult time coming up with something that fit my travel themed Alphabe- Thursday. While there are many countries starting with the letter ‘U’, I have only traveled the USA and UK and both seemed a little broad for one post.  The fact that I am on vacation away from home i.e. no access to the bulk of my photos also does not help.

However on my old website I had a few underwater photos and videos uploaded from a vacation in Egypt and our sabbatical that we spent on Bonaire at the beginning of last year. While we were there for windsurfing, Bonaire, as part of the ABC islands, is known in the US as a diving destination and although we did not go diving, we did a lot of snorkeling. Needless to say – I wanted to take photos. But – unfortunately – not with my expensive DSLR.

On some of our snorkeling tours we took David’s GoPro Hero, primarily used for our windsurf videos, or my Nikon Coolpix P7000 point & shoot camera. Before we got there I had purchased a flexible underwater housing from Ewa Marine for it. At that point the camera was so new that I was unable to get a hard case. While the flexible housing worked and kept the camera safe, it was not very easy to handle underwater. However, considering the price difference between a flexible housing and a hard case, I would recommend the Ewa Marine one for an occasional dive or snorkel adventure. For us, I had really wished for one of the hard cases either by Ikelite or Fantasia, but both were only released a few months after we returned. However I still might get one for our next trip to Bonaire, because this is what you get to see underwater. And this is only a very tiny bit of it.

This is what you can see snorkeling the waters around Bonaire (please excuse the pixelation on the photo, it is not quite as bad in the video, but I think I will re-do the video when I get home 😉):

And this is some amazing under water life at the Red Sea, Egypt (please excuse the pixelation on the photo, you won’t see any in the video):

Thanks to Dan-O for the music: Free Royalty Free Music by DanoSongs.com

So when will you go snorkeling with your camera to take some underwater photos? To experience underwater life first hand is such a great experience! One little advice – don’t be disappointed if the photos don’t turn out as nice and colorful as you have seen it in reality. The reason is that the automatic white balance setting does not work correctly so that you either have to use a color filter on your camera lens or have to do the work later in post-processing. And that’s it for this week’s travel – underwater photos – with the letter ‘U’ – hope to see you soon again.

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This is my contribution today to round 5 of Alphabe- Thursday hosted by Jenny Matlock. If you have a moment please visit her website and check out other ‘student’s’ work and her ‘terrific tangents’.