Trying The New Underwater Camera Mount

It's been vexing that I go diving and take pictures of everyone and everything else. There isn't any evidence that I'm actually there... So with that challenge, I set out to create a camera mount that I could carry with me and use to take different kinds of pictures - including self-portraits.

DeAnna gave me a nifty new kind of camera mount for Christmas called a "Monster Pod". It consists of a cloth cover, a camera screw and a big blob of "Silly Putty" . You are supposed to stick the mount to anything and you have an instant "tripod". The application of the idea was not so useful though. After a few sticky episodes where grime got into the silly putty and the goop stuck to hot rocks and wouldn't come off, I set the Monster Pod aside. Fortunately, I didn't throw it away!

I decided to completely clean out the Monster Pod from it's gooey Silly Putty and stitch in a one-pound bag of lead shot. The hope was that it would be heavy enough to keep the camera on the bottom and not let any currents move it around. The result is this nifty-looking setup that I can pocket with me.

So I had this thing all ready to go earlier in the week but weather wasn't all that great for diving on Saturday. Fortunately, Sunday dawned beautiful on the West side, so I headed back to Electric Beach and took a very relaxing hour-long dive (along with 50 or so other divers). Here are the results!

I have many pictures of flippers or where I never even made it into the frame. The 10 second timer is OK on land, but it's a quite difficult to swim away from the camera and get into the frame before the camera goes off!



The area has a lot of fish because of the warm water from the electric plant discharge. It also attracts a lot of spearfishermen! They snorkel and dive down to catch fish. They also drag their fish around with them which makes me nervous about attracting sharks.

The discharge pipes are about 15 feet across and they spew warm water out into the ocean with impressive force. Where the pipes discharge, there are masses of fish. The water is almost always clear and the currents light at this beach so it's very easy to find scuba divers from sun-up to sun-down.

You can see that the pipes are oriented upwards a little, so it's incumbent on the diver NOT to get into the current or you can be swept upward to the surface. Not good for decompression (the bends). I stayed well clear and got a fair picture to boot!

The coral here is quite prolific and pretty. It makes for a nice portrait frame. I took this picture several times before success because I had to start the camera and swim around to the other side of the rock and up behind the coral before the camera took the picture. I used up a lot of air to get this picture!

This is the best self-portrait I got out of about 50 pictures. It's about 20 feet down with white sand surrounded by coral. Like I said, swimming around to get in the frame is much more difficult than I thought it would be but I'm happy with the new underwater camera mount!

It was a good weekend to get out and relieve some stress. This week will be very busy with several visitors from Accenture. I'm looking forward to visiting... and next weekend! :-)