My first experience with underwater macro photography came in 1987. I was on a trip to the Bahamas, and the water was a little murky for my 15 mm lens, so I rented a 28 mm lens and some extension tubes (the ones with the little goal posts to tell you how far away to put your camera, to show you where the edges of the frame will be, and to scare away all the animals). I got what I thought were some pretty good results, so I bought a 28 mm lens, a set of Helix tubes, and set off on my own. I took the setup to the Red Sea in 1989, and was happy with the results, but on that trip I met Chris Newbert, who proceeded to show me that you could take underwater macro photography to a level that I'd never dreamed of. Chris convinced me that I should change to a housed single-lens reflex. He said that the Nikonos tubes-and-feelers arrangement had the following problems:

1. You couldn't see the subject from the same angle as the camera, so you couldn't judge the composition.
2. The short-focal-length Nikonos lenses caused the subject to be too close to the lens to light it from the front.
3. The short-focal-length Nikonos lenses meant you were right on top of your sometimes-nervous subjects.
4. The goal posts scare everything away (I'd already figured that one out).

I had an old Nikon F I wasn't using, having upgraded to an F3 for my land-based photography. I even had a 105 mm f/4 Micro-Nikkor. I found a well-used sports finder, and bought an Ikelite housing, then I went to Cayman Brac to try it all out. At first, it was a real handful. Even with the sports finder, it was dim in there, and the transparent Ikelite case meant there was a lot of glare. At close distances (the old 105 focused to 1:2) there wasn't much depth of field, and I had the classic problem of finding the subject. You see something good, preset the focus to about what you think you want, put the camera in front of your face, and everything's so blurry that you can't see whatever it was you wanted to make a picture of. You move the camera back and forth, and sometimes your subject gets to be sharp enough that you can compose the picture, but most of the time it's just this big blur. So you lower the camera, reset the focus, find some landmark that you can see even when it's blurry, and try again. This time you find the subject, and just as you're pressing the shutter release, it swims away.

Some of the awkwardness disappeared with practice, but it was still darned dim in that finder. I got the f/2.8 version of the 105, and that helped a little. The glare continued to bother me, and I worried about the wobbly macro port on the Ikelite housing. Just before a trip to the Coral Sea in 1992, I sprang (sprung?) for an F4, the autofocus 105 f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor, and an Aquatica housing. I also got a pair of Ikelite AI/n strobes to replace my Ike 150s. I tried to use autofocus, and on a night dive early in the trip, the focus algorithm got confused and told the focus motor to drive the front of the lens into the port. This didn't do the port any good, and ruined the focus motor (turned out I had the port for the manual focus 105). This underwater photography business was getting pretty expensive, and I didn't have as much to show for it as in the days of tubes and goal posts.

In January of 1993, I took a trip down to LA to meet Alan Broder, the guy who'd sold me the housing, and he gave me the right port, and taught me a few things about adjusting the housing to the camera. Alan also said that I was going to Fiji in a couple of months, and asked me if I'd like to come along. I went, stopped trying to use autofocus, and at last began to achieve consistent results. I went back to Fiji with friends in the fall of '93, everything worked fine. By the next year, I was starting to want to get closer than 1:1. I got the Nikon 3T and 4T accessory diopters, and went to the Solomons with Chris Newbert. In addition to his consistent good humor and his excellent photo advice, Chris showed me how to rebuild the Aquatica housing myself, and he showed me a more accurate way of adjusting the housing to the camera than I'd learned from Alan. I left the 3T on for most of the trip, allowing me to get a little more than life-size magnification. I liked the arrangement, although I wanted to get even closer, but when I got home and developed the negatives, I found some minor aberrations. These artifacts took the form of smearing of the spectrum of white objects like grains of sand, so that the edge towards the center of the image had a red (or blue, I forget which) halo, and the edge towards the outside had the opposite color halo. These artifacts are small: about 2 pixels wide in a full-res PhotoCD scan. However, they annoyed me and in some images (the ones with a lot of bright detail at the edges of the frame) it took a long time to retouch them out.

I set aside my quest for greater than 1:1 magnification, bought an extension ring for my macro port and a longer focusing gear, and put my 200 mm f/4D AF Micro-Nikkor in the housing. If I couldn't get greater magnification, at least I could get 1:1 from farther away. At first, it was like the first time I used a 105. "Subject, what subject? There's nothing but a blur out there." After a while, I got used to it, and on a trip to Little Cayman Island in 1997, I used the 200 much more than the 105.

When I went to PNG in the fall of 1997, I started trying to get more than life-size again. I discovered that, if I put a 2X extender on the 105 AF, that the focusing ring lined up with the Aquatica gear that was meant for the 200. That gave me 2:1, with about 6 inches of subject distance. I had to preset the aperture ring before each dive, and the results were just a hair soft, but I made a fair number of good pictures that trip.

The next step in my macro evolution was changing extenders. I liked the subject distance and the range of magnifications available with a tele-extender, but I certainly didn't need to focus to infinity like I could do with the 2x, especially since I still had no way to change apertures underwater. I constructed an Excel spreadsheet to sort out my options (the basis for all the tables in this section of the web site), and vectored in on a 1.4X extender, and 41.5 mm of extension tubes. This put the focusing ring to a place that matched the Aquatica gear for the 200. I've achieved good results with this setup.

I still couldn't adjust the aperture underwater. In September of 1998, Geoff Semorile at Camera Tech in San Francisco solved that problem by creating a removable aperture gear extension as well as an extension for the focusing gear. I switched from the TC-14A to the TC-14 and that fixed the slight vignetting at 2:1. I tested the whole setup in the Solomons in September of 1998, and the results were technically superb. As for the art, I suppose I'll never be satisfied...

I changed to a Nikon D-100 in 2004. That gave me the equivalent of a built-in 1.5x teleconverter, so I didn't need the TC-14 any more. I haven't tried to use extension tubes, but I do have a water-contact closeup lens I can slap on if I need to. The 1.5x "magnification" of the D-100 turned my 60mm lens from something I almost never used to a great little workhorse. The 105 now has enough reach that I don't think I'll ever want to use a 200 with this camera. It's nice to be able to get close without all the exotic, one-off gear that I needed with the F4.

Jim