My Underwater Camera Housing, What my set up looks like and how I look after it!
Hey team! As I’m currently preparing for an underwater shoot, I thought it was a great opportunity to bring you along on my cleaning process here on the blog! Sounds boring right? But it’s so super important though! You spend thousands on a camera set up and therefore choosing the right housing and looking after it to keeping your gear clean and dry is just common sense! So here we go, an insight into what my set up looks like as I go through a thorough cleaning process!
My underwater photography set up consists of my Fujifilm X-T5 in an Aquatech Edge housing. Its made bespoke for my model of camera, and the ports I use depend on my lenses. I mainly use the Fujifilm XF 30mm F2.8 macro and Fujifilm XF 60mm F2.4 R macro for alot of my watery abstracts, surf and portraits. Under the water I’m starting to experiment with the Fujifilm XF 14mm F2.8 R too, as in this environment objects appear enlarged in the water. So sometimes it just calls for a wide angle.
So, first things first! After any shoot I rinse my housing with fresh water straight away. This is usually at showers or taps accessible down at the beach or I’ll pour a bottle of water over it once I’m back at the van. Salt water and sand will destroy anything - so not worth the risk!
Once the housing has been towel dried, I’ll also allow some time to air dry - but in all honesty, this depends how desperate I am to get my memory card out and check out the pictures! Once we are all dry I’ll open the housing up with the top latches and with the backplate off, I’ll then take out my camera.
First thing I’ll check over is the o ring - this needs to be perfectly clean - any dust, sand or hairs will prevent the water tight seal from doing its best so this is very important. My o ring was pretty bad as you can see from this photo - so I just take it out and rinse off in the sink with warm soapy water (a little washing up liquid works so well!) - then I’ll dry it, let it also air dry… to be super sure its dry before you place it back in the housing.
Once thats all sorted, I’ll pop my camera back in with some new de-fog inserts - I get mine from Amazon for like £5.
Then I pop the backplate back on, securely closing the latches. I’ll then make sure the port is lovely and clean with some gentle, alcohol free screen/lens cleaner and a cloth.
But I want to take this one step further - for this next shoot and some others coming up, it would be great to get some BTS video at the same time - so this is where the GoPro comes in! I’ve purchased a self adhesive mount, attached it to my housing, and then its pretty simple to attach the GoPro. i’m using the Hero 8 which is pretty dated now so if this becomes something I do more of, I’ll probably look to upgrade that soon - but for now, it does what I need.
So now I’m all clean, good to go, AND I’m ready for photo and video for my next outing!
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Thanks for reading and happy shooting!
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