Photographic Notes

On Travel

Travelling with a lot of photography equipment is difficult. Customs folk have been suspicious of me and my gear on almost every trip I've been on, even though I tell them: "no, this equipment is not new." "yes, I'm bringing it back to the States." "no, I'm not trying to sell the housings overseas." ... And I get grief from customs folk both in the U.S. and overseas. I had to bring an extra underwater housing on this trip, so I checked in three bags. When I arrived at the Continental counter in Guayaquil about hour ago, I was told that there was some sort of embargo, and that I would be allowed to check in at most two bags. I managed to convince them to let me pay the excess baggage fee and check the third bag, but they did have me worried for a few minutes...

And here in Ecuador, the guy at the gate just asked me if I was a marine, and then proceeded to grill me about minutiae in my passport for a few minutes. I'm taking this as a sign that I need to grow my hair back out.

On Photo Equipment

You definitely need to bring a long lens to the Galapagos. I've been using a 100-400mm lens during topside naturalist trips with good results, but a 70-200mm might suffice because you can get close to almost all of the animals you will see. Obviously, if you shoot with a long lens, you should shoot with a high shutter speed to avoid blurry images. Most of my shots were exposed for values between 1/250 and 1/800 second -- and the only reason I can get away with 400mm at 1/250 is that I am shooting with an image stabilizing lens. Bring an external flash and ask the guide for permission to use it as a fill-flash from far away. Some guides are ok with this if they believe that you won't walk up to an animal and use a flash right in its face. Fill flash is necessary because the sun is often directly overhead, which will create shadows that can ruin a good number of shooting opportunities. Also, bring a polarizer to minimize reflections in harsh sunlight.

Underwater, you'll probably want to shoot mostly wide-angle. I used a 16-35mm, 20mm, and 15mm full-frame fisheye lens with my full-frame digital SLR. If you do not have a full-frame SLR, you'll definitely want to shoot whale sharks with the 15/16mm full-frame fisheye lens. Otherwise, you won't be able to light up the behemoths unless you want a portrait of the face alone. At Cousin's Rock, you may want to take a 50mm or 100mm macro lens down to shoot Pacific seahorses, endemic Galapagos nudibranches, and hawkfish.

I believe that big strobes are *not* necessary here. Most of the time you aren't going to get clear sunny skies, especially up north at Wolf and Darwin; it was so dark underwater that I shot at ISO 200 during most dives and rarely got to stop down past f7.1 or so. I did decide to bring stronger strobes this time around (two Ikelite SubStrobe 200 strobes), but I never cranked either of them up past 1/4 power. I think the ideal strobe setup for Galapagos is a pair of Ikelite DS-125s with diffusers on, but that's because I like to shoot my subjects really close with balanced ambient light. If you are going for a really dark background and want to light up your subject from further away, more powerful strobes could be useful.

On Computer Stuff

Bring a computer and make a slideshow for the rest of the passengers. People like that sort of thing. :) Also, bring a DVD or two and leave them on the boat. The crew will really appreciate it.