Cool, it's nice down Mudeford.

Yeah it was pretty cool, though I was also worried about the seaweed. Annoyingly YouTube has "improved" the videos to reduce shake and improve brightness, pretty much making them look toxic neon yellow and doing weird things with the shake. Hopefully it'll revert back in a bit!

My plan is to maybe try Pool Quay at some point. I thought the Alternative camera worked quite well too. It'd be good to develop it so that there's an element of control, so you could make sure it it facing the pontoons etc. This would be useful for doing quick surveys of the marine life in marinas.

I also want to replace the camera with something that can do more than 20 minutes of video at a time. Maybe a Pentax. Once the videos are sorted I'm going to contact the different manufacturers in the slim hope they might want to provide one of their cameras for a comparison, and as a promotional thing to show what they can do.

Failing that, I might see about applying for some grants. The cost of these cameras is peanuts really, unless I want a decent camera + waterproof housing. There's a lot of applications, if I got a Pentax you can do a timelapse thing, so I could set it to take a picture every x seconds for several hours and then leave it. This would be useful for seeing how long it takes the wildlife to return to a site post-disturbance, as a lot of ecology is to do with trapping animals to see what is in the area.Obviously the results could be biased if you set a trap for 3 hours and it takes 5 hours for some things to come back to where the humans were setting up the trap...

It's an option, I'm going to be approaching different companies regarding sampling/reviewing kit, don't know if any will, but worth a punt. Failing that I might see about some scientific research grants, but generally they exclude the purchase of equipment. The go pro would be great for deeper water stuff, and wouldn't surprise me if they're what will be used on a similar project at Boscombe Surf Reef this year.

The annoying thing was the amount of time I had because of the camera limit on video. Quite often in the videos I took not much happened for the first 5 mins, then 5-8 minutes quite a few turn up. A couple of times I left it for 10-12 minutes and right as I lifted it out of the water you could see maybe 10-15 crabs turning up. Would be good to leave it for 20+minutes!

Would be good, but needs more than 1m of waterproofness. The GoPro HD looks good though with the depth thing.

I'm going to email all the different companies and local camera shops and see if anyone wants to sponsor/supply equipment to test, either for free or discount. Worth a shot haha.

I'm going to email all the different companies and local camera shops and see if anyone wants to sponsor/supply equipment to test, either for free or discount. Worth a shot haha.

Anything for free gear to 'test'!

might take a bit more effort and you'd maybe need to alter the housing (running a risk of it letting water in) - but why not look into run a cable to a laptop, getting that white frame out of view, maybe dropping the bait on a separate line and then attempting to capture some photos.