420 Dive Log Australasia OCTOBER 2026

Greater depth was only part of the benefit. What changed my photography was becoming calmer, safer and more deliberate. An efficient duck-dive meant I arrived below the surface without wasting energy. Better buoyancy awareness and slower movements made my approach less disruptive. As my breath-hold improved, I no longer felt compelled to press the shutter the instant I reached the subject. I could settle, bring the camera into position gradually and wait for the animal’s posture, the light and the background to come together. I enjoyed freediving enough to continue through increasingly advanced courses and eventually became a certified AIDA 4 Master Freediver. Yet the value of that training to my photography is not measured by my maximum depth. For most photographs, I need to descend cleanly, hold position, compose without rushing and return to the surface with an appropriate safety margin. No image justifies overstaying a dive or ignoring the basic principles of safe freediving. My first underwater camera opened the door. Freediving taught me how to move through it. A camera that fits the dive There is no shortage of underwater camera systems. Alongside cameras built specifically for the water, almost every popular compact, mirrorless or DSLR camera can be paired with a housing. The options range from inexpensive action cameras to professional systems costing tens of thousands of dollars. For a freediver, however, the largest or most technically capable system is not automatically the most useful. I must descend, equalise, close the distance to the animal and compose the photograph on one breath. A bulky rig adds resistance and can make every stage of that process more cumbersome. I need a camera small enough to swim with efficiently, quick enough to operate under pressure and versatile enough to deal with subjects ranging from tiny marine life to rays, sharks and other large animals. That is why I chose the Olympus Tough TG-6. Its successor, the OM SYSTEM Tough TG-7, follows the same basic approach and remains, in my opinion, one of the strongest all-round

options for compact underwater photography. The attraction is not simply that the camera is small and robust. Its close-focusing ability makes the TG series particularly effective for macro photography. The camera can focus as close as one centimetre from the front of the lens, allowing me to work with nudibranchs, seahorses, shrimp, small octopuses and other tiny subjects. That gives a relatively inexpensive camera a genuine underwater speciality rather than merely making it a convenient camera that can survive getting wet. Both the TG-6 and TG-7 use a 12-megapixel 1/2.3-inch sensor and a 25–100 mm equivalent fixed zoom lens with a maximum aperture of f/2 at the wide end. They can record JPEG and RAW files as well as 4K video. These specifications are modest beside a modern full frame camera, but underwater photography is not decided on a specification sheet. Top: An example of a moody ambient-light silhouette shot taken with a wide-angle lens on a bright, sunny day. Bottom: The same scenario, but this time I used a single strobe to bring out the colour and reveal all those beautiful sponges in their full glory.

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DIVE LOG Australasia #420 October’ 26

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