TAZM PICTURES

Last Christmas, I ordered my daughter a last-minute Christmas gift, paying for “guaranteed” delivery by Christmas.  It was a waterproof cover for her Flip HD camera – and the timing was important because we were headed to Hurghada, Egypt, for a week of sun and snorkeling – on Christmas day.  Thirty bucks for the cover, and a $160 camera, make for probably one of the least expensive ways to get high-definition underwater video – certainly much less than many of the rigs you can buy out there.  And I was hoping she’d let me give it a try as well

Needless to say, it didn’t arrive on time.  Then the on-board catalog offered a waterproof digital video camera, which I bought instead, but that turned out to be a non-functioning piece of cr@p (I know, I should have known but I was desperate at this point).  By the way, if you ever buy something like this aboard Jet Air, don’t expect to get a refund.  They tell you to write the airline and the company, and in this case, neither responded.

DON’T BUY THIS CAMERA!!

Anyway, we had to make do with the standard underwater “single use” still cameras you get at beach resorts.  We tried out a couple of different ones and found the best results from this model, which is not a single-use camera like the others, but is instead an inexpensive camera that loads standard 35mm film.  If you find yourself looking for an inexpensive way to capture underwater scenes, look for one of these, and buy the fastest speed film you can – 400 or 800 – and make sure it has flash capability.  In general, underwater photos seem to always look dingier than than they looked in real life, and the flash makes a big difference.  Try and get as close as you can to your subject, and I suggest using the flash for every shot.  Even with this camera, I found myself doing a lot of adjusting afterward (increasing the contrast and saturation, and filtering out some of the blue) but I think, given what we spent, still managed to get decent results.

THIS KESTON UNDERWATER CAMERA WITH FLASH PERFORMED BEST!

I strung together our best photos in a video slideshow, which you can check out below.  For fun, I added a parallax effect on a few of them (more about that in a previous post)

We hope to try out the Flip and its waterproof cover in a couple of weeks when we head to Crete – stay tuned!

In case anyone other than me has cracked the lens of their Flip camera (or one of its close cousins – it would probably work for them as well) here’s how I fixed mine after it had an unfortunate encounter with a curious cat and a stone floor 3 feet below.  It turns out the “lens” you see on the outside is just a transparent dust cover, with the actual lens about half an inch down below.  But the glass is quite thin, and if you crack it, the whole thing is pretty much unusable.

I had only had it a few weeks, and after verifying that the electronics still worked fine, I contacted Flip, and was told “sorry, we don’t repair that part of the camera”.  In retrospect, I should have asked, if not that, then what?  It seems like one of the easiest to break – and repair.

So I carefully removed the broken glass (fingernails or a toothpick or maybe a small nail or push pin will get you started – it’s really thin) and simply went down to my local watch repair store.  They found a perfect match which lies flat on the 2mm edge.  Cost me about ten bucks.   But they’ll probably tell you that you have to mount it yourself.  And here’s the important part:  like me, you’ll probably be tempted to use super glue.  DON’T.  For any glue that fumes like super glue, the fumes get trapped inside the space between the real lens and the “watch crystal”, leaving a film on all the surfaces, to include the glass.  Instead, use a non-fuming epoxy, and try to avoid getting too much glue under the lens, sticking to the edges if possible.  Don’t worry, you have about 3 mm room for error along the edges of the watch glass.  Voila!  Ten bucks and you’re back in business.

I’m still waiting for a response from @FlipVideoBrand on Twitter.  I’m not sure they’ve figured out the Twitter thing yet.

Just returned from a grueling,longer-than-expected trip in Washington, D.C.  It wasn’t all for naught – though I had to wait until Friday for a series of grueling job interviews that had been scheduled for Monday, it resulted in a job offer. And while I waited, I snagged some video footage of the DC blizzard – which really was a blizzard, as far as I could tell – using a newly-acquired Flip Ultra HD.  Of course the sound was a mess because of the wind blowing on the mic, but I think I managed to find some sound that accurately captured the empty, almost desolate mood on the streets of our normally crowded capital:

And then, the next day, life had almost returned to normal, along with some trick skiers in front of the Lincoln Memorial: