Although I have dived the Great Barrier Reef before, I was so excited to be coming back after quite a few years out of the water. I had done my refresher dives down in Victoria, which roughly translated means that you suffer an instant ‘ice headache’ as you submerge due to the bracing temperatures. I spent too much time reading and reading snorkel masks reviews to be sure I would have the optimal set up. On the Barrier Reef however all that was required was a nice thin wetsuit… ‘Why has it taken me so long to return?’ was again the question that kept playing through my mind as I watched the two reef sharks circling below prior to my slipping weightlessly into the depths…

All the (many) images in this post were taken using a simple Panasonic Lumix DT4 ‘point and shoot’ that I hired from the dive company Pro Dive while onboard their Silversonic dive vessel, since I do not as yet own an underwater housing for my 5 D’s. The Lumix is a reasonable little camera for it’s size, but with some fairly big limitations, not least of which is that it does not allow you access to the RAW files, providing JPEG’s only. Also, as it was in a very simple housing, there was no way to attach an external flash, and the built in one is pretty useless underwater due to issues with backscatter. However, for all that it was of course preferable to have a camera with me than not… I have performed some colour correction on the resulting JPEG files, which by their very nature of being shot at a higher ISO are a little bit grainy…

The service from Pro Dive in Cairns was superb, and I would not hesitate to recommend them. After we docked back at Port Douglas I grabbed this quick snap on my Canon of our vessel for the day, the Silversonic…

I have since started planning my next dive trip, and at some stage am definitely going to purchase a decent underwater housing for my camera; I really missed not being able to add flash to my subjects and the extra processing capabilities that comes from shooting RAW files, combined with the overall control afforded by a D-SLR. Still, I was generally happy with the results considering I hadn’t taken a camera underwater in many years…