Hi Folks,

The link below will lead you to a trip report and images from a recent
trip to Oahu and Big Island in Hawaii. For those who are considering
G7 as a compact camera for UW, this may give a few more data points.

[scroll down past the text to reach the image thumbnails].
Trip report: Oahu and Big Island Hawaii
Cheers,
Ajay.

Ajay, those are some beautiful pictures. The flatworm on the hard coral was my favorite, although I have a soft spot for invertebrates.

I am looking at a new underwater camera in the next year or so, and the G7 is definitely on my short list, so I have some questions. What sort of rig did you use? Was it the Ikelite housing or the Canon housing? Any strobe? How about wide angle or macro lenses?

Thanks for the comments.. I myself like the little yellow frogfish, even though it is a bit overexposed.

I am using G7 in the canon WP-DC11, a combination that is very compact -- less to carry. The long zoom
of the G7 is nice because you can catch the skittish fish from a distance. But the housing has a long nose
that blocks the internal flash in the lower half of the frame. So you better use an external strobe.
I use an Inon Z220 strobe, with an optical cable that hooks up easily to the housing -- when the internal
flash of the camera fires, the optical cable signals the Inon strobe to fire (slave mode). If the image is
burnt or dark, I just turn a knob on my strobe to turn its power up/down (namely: no TTL, just manual
strobe power adjustment).

The WP-DC11 has a curved-rectangular nose, not good for wet-lens attachments for WA or Macro.
In the past, I used to dive with an Oly 5050 cam and had WA as well as Macro lens, but which I seldom
used, so I am ok living without additional lens on the G7.

For me, G7 is only a marginal improvement over my (5yr older!) Oly 5050 (you can compare my
Hawaii images, for example, with those from any of my 2006 trips in the website below).

Ajay's UW images and trip notes

Best,
Ajay.

Hi Ajay,
Since I go to Oahu on occasion I recognize some of the familiar faces in your photos. The perfectly framed shrimp is an excellent shot. BTW, if you're ever over in Oahu again and up for a shore dive you ought to go to Hanauma Bay. Yes, the tourist trap. Its a great dive to the outer reef. Cheap as well. I hauled a few tanks down inside the crater. The trip from the car to the place where the trolley takes you down the hill is quite a distance to carry two tanks. Better have a small hand truck with you. Awesome dive though, huge coral heads, 1 mushroom looking coral that was 20ft across, 25ft tall and looked like a toadstool. All kinds of life that has been protected from the tourists by the inner reef.

Thanks for the kind words, but... (The Digital photographers' dictionary):
Frame, v., To crop a 10 m-pixel image using software, before reducing image size
for web usage.




Good tip; Hanauma has surprisingly good sea life: we saw several eels, all the usual fishes and even
a gang of four blue-lined trevally during snorkling, but the water in the shallows was murky. A dive
ought to be good.

Cheers,
Ajay.