Out of boredom and curiosity I've built a frame to attach a waterproof camera to, along with dive torch and bait. My test run was Mudeford Quay today, which is only about 3-5m deep. It worked quite well given how murky the water is!



First attempt - Nice and clear except for some seaweed!
http://youtu.be/5-hpxYgJW88?hd=1


Moved along the quay a bit to where it was deeper and more murky, but got a number of crabs on camera
http://youtu.be/M11Uka_D7ng?hd=1




Secondary camera, got a good view of the side of the quay, and caught a crab off guard half way through!
http://youtu.be/0fwc5xGY9S4?hd=1

Cool, it's nice down Mudeford.

This is awesome. I wish I made more time to start and finish projects I'd thought of.

You must have been pleased when you saw it come up the first time with a load of crabs attached.

What are your plans for it?

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...

Nice work on this! If you had the money I'd say check out the http://gopro.com/camera-accessories/replacement-hd-housing/ with a Hero 2, the quality on these is fantastic, depends if you like the wide angle footage it takes or not though

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.

Cool idea, amazing how many crabs you manage to get in a short space of time will be interesting to see what you manage to get over a few trips.

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!

Could try a contour roam for cheaper hd and more mounting options (lens rotates a full 360). They're brilliant vids.

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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.

There is a waterproof case available for it that takes it to 60mtrs.

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Quote from: zpyder on April 15, 2012, 19:27:13 PM
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'!

Unsurprisingly I've not heard back from the companies I've contacted...so I'm wondering if you guys have any suggestions on other places to contact? I was pondering the camera magazines as they might be interested in an artical on a novel use of the tough cameras potentially.

So far on the contact list is:

Pentax
Jessops
Castle Cameras



I'm hoping just by the nature of the request it might take them longer to respond. Would have thought Jessops would as it went through their "educational" channel so at the very least I'd expect an email regarding educational discount or something...

I will probably contact GoPro and Contour too this evening.

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.

It'd be easy to not have the frame in view, but I kinda wanted it in the video as it gives a size reference (sort of). It was just the initial run anyway, to see if it'd work, which it does! Lots to have a play with.

I'd love to have a feed to a laptop, would be brilliant to somehow make a budget ROV!