Photography - Accidents & Equipment Insurance

Having acquired all your nice expensive equipment, you may want to insure it against damage and flooding. Alright, perhaps not a cheap film camera, but a high-end housed 35mm, digital, or video camera certainly deserves the protection. On the other hand, with proper care and maintenance, and attention to detail when sealing it up, a modern camera housing is extremely unlikely to leak.

Here's something I learned the hard way:

Batteries + saltwater = one really nasty corrosive mess. Regular old alkalines are not nearly as destructive when you get them wet. What does this mean? Use NiMH batteries in the camera inside the housing, but use alkalines inside your strobes, so that if the battery compartment does flood, you can just rinse it out with fresh water and maybe lemon juice. The result of a wet NiMH battery will eat away the metal contacts of the battery compartment so fast that by the time you can do anything about it, it's too late. Alkaline batteries have plenty of oomph to drive a strobe, although not a camera. If your camera housing floods, the battery type won't really matter, since the saltwater will destroy the camera all by itself.


fish anatomy

Fins come in a bewildering assortment of designs. Options include long, short, vented, solid, soft, hard, open-heel, full-foot, and a wide range of specious do-dads, most of which solve problems that I cannot confirm even exist. One manufacturer has even come out with fins that are left and right, something that I think must be truly bothersome while gearing up.

The fact is, most fin designs simply miss the mark for New Jersey divers. What is needed here is a solid, tough fin with a generous foot pocket that will hold not just your foot, but also whatever bulky thing your foot is in. This will be at least a 6mm booty, if not a drysuit boot with perhaps several pairs of socks underneath. Simple solid buckles with quick releases are essential. You will be amazed at how strongly your fins may stick onto your feet at the end of a dive. Small vents in the toe of the foot pocket help here, to break the vacuum.