Our World is blessed with an abundance of life-supporting water. We highlight the water importance in every way, and as an everyday theme, it rapidly grows. The wish to see what all hides underwater is ancient, but the ability to bring out visual records from our “inner space” became possible only relatively recently.
Our visual recording devices are created for use in the air. Their optical, mechanical and electrical components must have air around them to work properly. So we encase a normal camera in an artificial “air bubble” to make sure it will operate in water. Underwater housings and bodies of amphibious cameras are just that: air bubbles for our mechanisms to safely work within.
There are two main types of underwater photo- and video-graphing devices, both becoming ever cheaper by dint of standardizations and mass-production.
So-called amphibious cameras can be used in the air and in the water. For now, these are somewhat depth-limited, since their “pocketability” form factor sets limits to their pressure resistance. For divers which normally go deeper, or for people who do not need to photograph underwater very often, underwater camera housings may present a better solution. Majority of action cameras nowadays belong into this class.
There are other systems where cameras work in liquid-filled volume so as to be near impervious to great pressures. Outstanding technology, but oh boy, beware the price! It puts those way out of our scope here.
In order to understand the watertighting which is the most important feature of such cameras and housings, let’s see what a watertighting system does, and how its proper working order should be maintained. Whatever the need, whatever type of underwater camera is “better”, its air bubble has to remain dependably safe.
These simple drawings show how it all works.
All cameras and u/w casings have to be opened to access some elements: batteries, contacts or memory cards. Their doors, covers and hatches must be opened and closed many times without compromising their ability to properly reseal the opening.
Manufacturers are trying to construct these accessing points as simple as possible for the user to operate, but some of those solutions are not as safe as can be for our air bubble contents! Sometimes those extremely flimsy aprons, scratch-sensitive ridges and rubber covers are easily damaged, and then our camera swamps and drowns, together with the joy of underwater picture-taking! Manufacturers which employ o-ring sealings delegate some maintenance to the user, but offer more safety to the cameras, because among all the watertighting means known, the o-ring principle works the best.
An o-ring is a self explaining name. It is made of perbunan (aka nitrile butadiene rubber, most commonly truncated to NBR or simply nitrile), neoprene or silicone compound material. The drawings here show it as a fat black dot.
To work properly, the round o-ring has to lie in the groove which is square in cross-cut. Such groove is usually provided either in the body of the casing, or in the cover that seals it. Usually the three sides of groove square belong to one part, while the remaining fourth side is formed by the closed second part.
An exception is seen in the Ikelite watertight box cross-cut, where the closed cover and the box form the three sides of the square o-ring seat, while the fourth is open to the water and pressure of the ambient. While all the other sealing types provide fixed closure where only o-ring moves to adjust itself under water pressure, the Ikelite type uses water pressure to progressively push down the cover onto the o-ring, so as to form an even more solid seal.
This type of sealing does its work equally well as the other o-ring principles shown, but the better part is in the ease of Ikelite’s o-ring removal and maintenance.
O-rings move and deform under ambiental pressure. So these wedge themselves in the corner open to the inner, lesser pressure. To enable it to move, o-ring and its groove must be slippery. Lubricant adds nothing to actual watertighting but many people will overgrease, thinking “the more the better” – which is dangerously wrong!
Properly greased o-ring is just grease-shiny – nothing more. Surplus grease collects sand, hair and salt crystals, which may effectively break the sealing and let the water where it doesn’t belong.
An adequate grease must be used. Depending upon o-ring material, manufacturers may suggest their optimal kind of lubricant. If there are no special suggestions, you can use clear household silicone grease.
To remove it for cleaning and greasing purposes, the easiest way is to slide (with two fingers) an o-ring along its groove toward one side, until it pops out. After cleaning it first, lightly grease a q-tip and run it all around the groove. Nothing but a thin film of grease should remain. Lubricate o-ring by pulling it trough greasy fingers.
Carefully put the o-ring back into the groove – and that’s all the maintenance it requires! If you don’t plan to use your camera casing for longer time, remove all (maintenance-accessible) o-rings and save them separately, best lying flat within a zip-loc bag, to retain their form.
Prior to next use, just clean and re-grease as described. If you take care of your camera or a casing and its sealing elements, these will serve you long and well.
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UPDATE: Recently I had a chance to review some action cameras where I have found yet another variation of underwater encasement gaskets! The difference is not big, but enough to cause a “think or thwim” situation.
On the good side, the new gaskets are more pliable; made of some different material that appears like a stronger version of household silicone sealant. That’s the good news, insofar as the gasket principle can’t possibly be as efficient as an o-ring; still it is an improvement. Of sorts.
Bad news is, these gaskets were not symmetrical in cross-cut! That means, one could easily remove them for cleaning – and inadvertently put them back into their groove the wrong way around! Such an error could result in its loss of efficiency, and that could, in turn, let the water into the encasement to play merry havoc with power and electronics. That we have paid for, but no Warranty will replace (water ingress is always user’s fault)!
This puts another caveat before the users. Prior to any servicing of the action camera casing, please make sure you check whether the gasket around the main hatch looks symmetrical in its cross-cut. If in any doubt about this, do the following:
- Note which side of the hatch / gasket goes into the casing first.
- Using two fingers, carefully slide the gasket up along its groove until it pops out of the upper groove side.
- Apply a waterproof marker to colorsign the spot at the gasket rim that first enters the casing.
- Now you know which side of the gasket goes where, and there is no chance to replace it in the wrong way.
- Occasionally renew the mark if it gets washed off. You might also mark the groove in the same place…
Anyway, I keep on hoping the Manufacturers will eventually see the light soon and all their funny whachamacallit rubber thingies will soon(est) be replaced with o-rings. Aside from reliability, it would also make the which-side-which-way problem gone. Until that happens, let’s better be overcautious – and keep our cameras dry and working!
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Keeping Cameras Dry
Sometimes you’ll hear people complain that their newly bought underwater camera delivers fogged-over images when first used in water. At other times, some cameras sealed against water make perfectly clear photos, and then all of a sudden their lenses and monitors inexplicably mist over from the inside, usually when they go from the warm environment to cold outdoors or into the water. In all cases, the experience results in frustration.
Some even returned their camera for the very reason, or replaced it with another model which then develops the same problem. It’s circumstances, not the camera!
If an amphibious camera was assembled in humid environment, it might have retained the moisture, since its sealings will keep that assembly line air within.
The same can occur with normal cameras when these are enclosed in watertight casings, such as our action cams.
There are ways to have the insides of your camera and waterproof casing dry. The most obvious are the drying tabs which most manufacturers sell, but there are other ways, sometimes a lot cheaper too.
Some materials, called desiccants, have the ability to collect moisture from ambiental air. The most popular among those is Silica-gel, its crystals packed in porous paper-like bags. Such packs vary; from several grams to kilogram sizes.
Smallish packages can be left in the closed camera battery chamber overnight. When you replace your battery the next day, you can expect the inside of the camera to be as dry as can be. And if your waterproof camera casing has sufficient room between the cam and the casing (where the desiccant pack can’t interfere with camera functions), simply keep it within. This will make sure your camera and insides of the casing won’t fog over when you dive.
Silica-gel can be regenerated by heating, either in the oven or in a small pot where you hang it so that the bags do not touch the pot sides. Just lay a wire across the pot, and hang the Silica-gel packages from it by paper clips. Heat up the pot and dry the packs for half an hour or so to get rid of accumulated moisture.
Keep the regenerated bags in an airtight container until you need to use them again.
Small action cameras have very tight space between the cam and waterproof casing, tighter than the size of Silica-gel crystals, and you can’t fit even the smallest desiccant pack within. So you’ll need another approach.
You know those tubular containers of vitamin tablets which are dropped into a glass of water to make sparkling vitamin drinks? There is non-toxic Silica-gel “sand” under such tube plug paper seal. If you carefully replace tea in a teabag with this “sand”, you get one very slim package which can be squeezed alongside the action cam. Just be careful not to spill the fine granules all over the camera – it could be quite hard to clean it out!
This desiccant is regenerated in the same way as described above. Be careful, though: teabag material burns!
Yet another way to get rid of moisture is to enclose the cam (with all hatches open or removed) in some airtight container together with crushed wads of cheapest newspaper. This is cheap and simple, and for small cameras one can use an empty resealable Nescafe tin can as an airtight space. Newspaper is very hygroscopic, and typical old-style “rag” is the best. It can collect the smallest traces of moisture overnight.
Common rice works too, but take care the rice dust does not get inside the camera. To ensure this, remove or open all camera hatches, then wrap the cam in newspaper. Put it into the airtight container, pour rice over everything, close tightly and leave overnight. Then carefully remove rice, unwrap the cam, inspect for dust. Meticulously clean it, especially the sealing parts and surfaces.
You can use this rice later to scare up some meal, too; its role of desiccant didn’t change it in any way!
Another material to keep the air around the camera in its casing dry is the ole blotter! Although majority of folks nowadays use keyboards instead of pen and ink, blotters still exist. Play with blotter paper and scissors to create thin, eficacious moisture removers, made to measure just for your specific action cam casing.
Last but not least, there’s common tissue paper, of course. To re-dry for the next use, just keep paper pieces in the warm air streaming from your computer. Keep all dry desiccant pieces in airtight Zip-loc until next use.
Flooded Camera: What To Do?
First, immediately remove the battery and memory card. Most memory cards are waterproof, so wipe them off with tissue, let dry and maybe the contents will still be readable. Connect dried card to the computer via card reader; don’t risk the memory card slot if your machine has it – card readers are cheaper if the card contacts are shorted or something.
Also, let the battery dry thoroughly for at least 24 hours. Li-ion batteries can spontaneously catch fire if something is not in order, so be aware of where and how to perform next test-charge. Putting the charger and dried-up battery on ceramic plate and keeping an eye on it for the whole duration of charging is good precaution thinking!
More bad news: water in the camera is never covered in any Warranty.
It is always regarded as user’s error. And expenditure. So you are left with three solutions.
One solution is, let your service repair the camera for you. Sending the camera to the service, keep the camera wet. If it was drowned in seawater, do not let it dry as this will complicate things. Wash the camera best you can to remove salt from its innards.
Then wrap it in wet cloth, put the bundle in watertight container and pack the whole so that it can stand the postal transport to the service. Call the service to announce it coming, explain the problem. Include some written explanation of the circumstances and what you did to remedy the situation.
Find out if the camera repairing costs are sensible! Sometimes it will be simpler and cheaper to buy new equipment. That would then be the solution #2.
Third solution is to try and repair the damage yourself if you feel you could do it. Or maybe delegate the honors to a friend who is handy in tackling such tasks. Your camera Warranty is off anyway, and whatever you do there will be a price to pay, so what can you lose?
But do read on. Perhaps what follows might help you to avoid or decide things…
Horror Story 1
After a dive we were sitting in the garden, drying cameras and preparing to develop the films. Along comes one of our diving buddies, says “I still have some air in the tank, let me go and expose one more roll…” As our E-6 chemicals are one-time-use only, this made sense; two rolls in the bath spiral for the price of one.
He grabs a Nikonos III, loads a roll of film, and dives in the shallow bay in front of the house. Several minutes later he’s out like a shot and shows us the camera. Brown water sloshes around in the $1400 lens port!
In his hurry, he plain forgot to plug the flash sync cable contact on the camera underside, and the sea was invited inside to play!
Imagine the atmosphere of taking the camera AND lens apart, washing out every tiny screw and spring and lever and aperture leaves and lens elements and… I shudder even thinking about doing this ever again!
We had to be quick about it as no parts within the camera are corrosion-resistant. Seems like Lady Fortune was at our side, for when we finally put it all back together and re-lubricated all moving parts, everything worked as before. And there were no surplus parts around, too!
MORAL OF THE STORY: Never hurry when you clean, set-up, or prepare your gear!
Horror story 2
The scene is an Underwater Photography Competition that takes two days. On the first day, everyone photo-hunts fishes; on the second day the theme is free.
One of diving competitor buddies (yes I know, but in diving no adversary is an enemy) …he scrambles out of the sea and his Nikon SLR in underwater housing is full of that telltale brown brine which comes from washed off film layers. And his facial expression looks even worse, as you can imagine. The $4000 plus system is DOA and he sure ain’t smiling!
Used to this (due to our Horror Story #1 experience), my buddy and me first prepare a solution from 1 liter of distilled water and 1 liter of pure alcohol (isopropyl). Since water and alcohol mix inter-molecularly, the total volume is less than two liters. This is an excellent washing and cleaning liquid; best first aid in such cases. We take the camera apart and wash everything in the mixture. The evaporating alcohol takes water out of every nook and cranny, and washed gear appears clean and dry.
So why did that underwater casing leak? We found out it was never serviced after the previous dive. Our friend admitted he just left it unserviced, postponing it until he forgot about it. In the meantime the sand particles, sea salt and biological matter had dried solid on all sealing points. It was enough to turn pleasure into a catastrophy.
Long story short, we managed to save the camera and the next day our friend was able to compete.
But that evening, our dinner and wine was on him!
MORAL OF THE STORY: Never enter the water with your equipment unserviced!
Horror story 3.
One of my two amphibious cameras let some water in during an underwater swim. The reason was the camera’s USB port watertighting that is sealed other than by classically dependable o-rings. I was lucky it happened in the lake, freshwater being far less corrosive than brine!
To be fair, it works well as long as both the rubber seal and its seat are absolutely clean and free of any obstacles. This is every camera’s weak spot. Even a hair or a grain of sand there is enough for a seal to fail!
First I had to decide whether to try and salvage the camera myself as the speedy reaction is essential, or to send the camera to the service. Sending takes time, and I did not want to risk internal corrosion.
So I removed the lens port, opened both hatches and did my best to get rid of the water (and the Warranty). I dried the battery and memory card as thoroughly as possible. Then I force-dried the camera innards by ingeniously connecting the hair dryer to it.
After putting the camera back together without battery and memory card, I carried it several times down to its rated maximum depth of 10 meters. Checked to find any signs of water ingress. Finding none, I re-inserted the battery and memory card. I was very lucky; everything worked as before.
So I have just once been careless enough not to check the sealing for obstacles before putting the camera underwater. And once was enough! Hopefully, should you follow the advices given, you may never have to experience anything similar.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Even shoemakers sometimes have a hole in the sole!
Thanks for having the patience to read through all this. I hope it saves you from some serious trouble. Enjoy your work and have a Good Light!
