During my recent vacation in Cuba I had the opportunity to try my Nikon 1 J4 doing some underwater photography, using it with the Nikon 1 WP-N3 waterproof housing. This was a very interesting experience for me as I had never done any underwater photography in the past.

I’d like to extend special thanks to fellow vacationers Joe Szanyi from Canada, and Roy from Britain, for giving me some tips on where to find these fish to photograph.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

The WP-N3 waterproof housing is designed for use only with the Nikon 1 J4 or S2 cameras. When used with the J4 all that needs to be done is to affix the zoom gear sleeve and inner reflection prevention ring to the 10-30 mm PD zoom.

Owners of the Nikon 1 S2 will need to reconfigure the inside of the WP-N3 with various spacers in order for that camera to work properly with the housing.

While waterproof to a depth of 45m (147 feet) the WP-N3 does not provide any shock protection so care must be taken not to drop or bang the housing against any hard objects when a Nikon 1 camera is inserted.

All of the controls can be operated while the camera is inside the housing including full access to the menu. I found the controls worked well with my WP-N3 unit.

The only real issue I had with the set up was an inability to actually see what I was trying to photograph on the rear panel. I don’t know why Nikon made the rear panel of the housing out of a blue/grey tinted material but it makes it almost impossible to see anything when used underwater. It is also very hard to view the rear panel when the unit is out of the water if the sun is shining on it.

It didn’t take too long before I began to point the assembly at an angle at least somewhat close to the one needed to photograph what I was hoping to capture. It was a bit of a ‘hit or miss’ proposition at first.

Since I have never shot anything underwater before I used a lot more auto-type settings with the Nikon 1 J4 than I typically would have for both stills and video. For example for stills I used matrix metering, AF-A (Auto-select AF), and auto-area AF mode.

When shooting video I used AF-F (Full-time AF), auto-area AF mode, and ‘P’ programmed  auto exposure mode.

When you can’t really see what you’re shooting there’s not much option except to use a lot of ‘auto’ settings and hope that the camera will perform up to expectations – which in my case the Nikon 1 J4 certainly did.

I didn’t use underwater lights or flash and the out-of-camera jpegs had an overall greenish cast to them and lacked some clarity and snap. As a result all of the images (except the one below) in this article were produced from RAW files. I had to experiment a bit to come up with an overall approach for post processing that wasn’t overly time consuming.

To help illustrate the difference between the out-of-camera jpegs and the finished images for this article produced from RAW files, here is an out-of-camera jpeg (the shadow in the image is my body).

The following image is the same scene but produced from the corresponding RAW file.

Here are some details of the post processing approach I used.

I began my post processing as I always do with OpticsPro 10 and made a few small adjustments taking lens softness settings to 1.20 for Global and 70 for Detail. I applied PRIME noise reduction to all of the images and also took Microcontrast to +10. Other than these simple adjustments only the standard ‘auto’ corrections were done in OpticsPro 10. I then exported a DNG file into CS6.

I had set the J4’s white balance to ‘underwater’ assuming that this would adjust colours appropriately but I was disappointed with the results. I ended up changing the white balance setting to ‘Auto’ in CS6 and found that this was very helpful in removing quite a bit of the greenish cast, although the images still looked a bit flat.

There were some variances between images, but for most of them I only made two initial adjustments in CS6 taking Contrast to +10 and Highlights to -100. At this point the images would have looked quite terrible to most folks. My main objective at this point in the process was to hold on to as much highlight detail as possible.

I then went into the Curves function in CS6 and applied the ‘Find Dark & Light Colours’ Option which completely transformed the images, giving them more definition and for the most part eliminating any residual greenish cast.

If needed, I made some slight adjustments to some of the hues in individual images but I didn’t spend too much time doing this kind of tweaking. As regular readers know I don’t like to spend more than 2 or 3 minutes on any given image in post.

I’m sure that as I experiment with these files a bit more I’ll find ways to improve them further while (hopefully) reducing processing time as well.

I certainly had a lot of fun with my first foray into underwater photography even though I didn’t use a mask/snorkel at all. Instead I shot while standing on the sea floor or while treading water.

The best images were those where I was shooting down on subjects with a maximum distance of about 1.5m (5 feet). Knowing this I’ll definitely use a mask and snorkel my next time out. I also shot a lot of images at the long end of the zoom.

A lot of other folks who were in the water with me were feeding the fish with bread, hard boiled eggs, or bananas. These certainly worked to attract the fish but the bread particles really caused the water to look cloudy and this affected overall image quality.

Being able to have a zoom lens capability was extremely helpful and the 1 Nikon 10-30 mm f/3.5-5.6 PD zoom performed quite well. I had to turn off the camera’s microphone when shooting video as any adjustment to the zoom lens created a loud zoom motor noise that was transferred to the video footage.

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Article and all images Copyright Thomas Stirr. All rights reserved. No use, duplication of any kind, or adaptation is allowed without written consent.