white_hart | Further adventures in aquatic photography (220/365) (Reply)

Last autumn, I bought a cheap GoPro-style camera with a waterproof housing to take pictures while I was swimming. It was fun, but I found out fairly quickly that its photographic possibilities were very limited; it had a fixed extremely wide-angled lens with a slight fish-eye effect which basically limited it to broad waterscapes and didn't pick up any foreground detail (eg birds), and had a tendency to wash out the sky. It was probably fairly inevitable, then, that I was going to buy a better waterproof camera sooner or later.

A tree-lined river reflecting a partly blue sky, with a clump of reeds overhanging in the left foreground.

My new camera is a Fujifilm XP140; it's one of the cheapest waterproof cameras that is an actual camera, rather than a budget action cam, but it's clearly a big step up in terms of picture quality.

Dark clouds and grey water with the riverbank and two trees silhouetted against a line of brightness in between.

It even has enough of an optical zoom to make taking pictures of waterbirds a possibility, though I think I need a bit of practice at that.

an adult grebe with a black crest and ruddy patch at the back of its head, and a chick with a black and white striped head and neck.

(Images from this weekend's swims: Friday in the river, starting in rain and ending in sun; Saturday in the river, starting in sun and ending in rain; and today in the lake, with grebes.)

Further adventures in aquatic photography (220/365)

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