My Journey

Sandra Stalker · Issue 139, Jul/Aug 2024 · pp. 45–51

Products mentioned: Epoque point and shoot film camera, Canon G7Xii, Ikelite housing, Backscatter Miniflash strobe, Sony A7RIV, Nauticam housing, Sony 28-60mm lens, Nauticam WWL-1B wet wide lens, Trioplan 50 lens, M42 microscope adapter tube, Lee Filter gels, Sea and Sea strobe, Backscatter video light

My first underwater camera was an epoque point and shoot film camera that I had picked up second hand in about 2003 with the dizzying heights of two settings: cloudy and sunny. It was probably more suited to tropical waters as colour images from my local Dorset dive sites were always a disappointment, brown on brown fuzz, so I resorted to shooting with black and white film as I could push the processing myself as I am an Art and Photography Technician at a college. I then moved on to a digital compact a few years later and bought my first macro diopter which was a game changer for photographing nudibranchs as my previous camera couldn’t get any closer than 1 metre. I am a bit of a nudibranch spotter nerd so I spent the next 15 years mostly taking ID shots so I could identify everything I saw on my dives. A good ID shot tends to be the absolute opposite of a creative shot with a flat on p…