What is it about being underwater that turns camcorder housing controls into the control panel of an alien spaceship? Pressing a button that you thought turned off autofocus suddenly locks you into a five-second still shot; trying to focus zooms out instead; and for some reason the button that you thought turned off auto exposure suddenly changes the white balance so you get maroon sharks.

There are lots of good reasons for confusion. Controls are hard to make out through a clumsy mask and your hands might be bound in thick 5mm neoprene for cold water. Your brain is probably trying to cope simultaneously with buoyancy, a dive computer, avoiding reef damage, and convincing a suspicious critter that you want to make it a star instead of eat it.

The solution is practice. Lots of it. Enough to make your housing controls fall naturally to hand without thinking.

That’s much easier said than done if you hold a day job above water and you’re lucky to get out once or twice a year for a dive vacation. Fortunately there’s a sneaky way around that limitation: Just as a pianist practices etudes at home before entering the concert hall, you can practice with your housing on dry land before you enter the water. And while you train your hands and brain, you’ll make sure your housing is in fine fettle before you pack it up for your trip.

Here are some video etudes to practice while you and your camcorder are in dry dock:

Read the manual. I know, I know. It can be painful duty. But how else can you find out what hoops your camcorder and housing can jump through and how to make them jump? Manual reading isn’t just for new equipment owners. A second reading after you’ve been out in the water can often yield surprises: features you didn’t understand before that now make perfect sense, secrets that make shooting video underwater that much easier.

Some tips to make manual reading less painful:

• Read a manual one small section at a time.
• Take the manual with you to places where you’ll have free time such as an auto repair shop, an airplane flight, or a post office.
• If you can’t be around your camcorder or housing to try out what you read in the manual, bring yellow sticky notes to mark items you want to try when you get back.
• And if you have trouble falling asleep, read your manual in bed. It’s a guaranteed soporific.

Practice inserting the camcorder and sealing the housing. This isn’t really an underwater skill, but you should be facile at getting your camcorder inside the housing, sealing the housing, checking to make sure everything works, and looking for false seals. If it all comes naturally, you’ll feel far less pressure on your dive trip to get everything ready in time. A harried diver rushing to get a hastily sealed housing into the water is a flustered diver blowing shots underwater or—worse—giving your camcorder innards a nice saltwater bath.

Shoot some video with the housed camcorder. Yup, it looks really weird carrying a housed camcorder around the house or neighborhood, but if it isn’t too heavy you should do it anyway. Zoom in and out. Set manual focus, then try adjusting the focus. Peer through your monitor back or viewfinder. Set up small, colorful objects in tricky locations and see if you can quickly position your housing to shoot them. Try some of the esoteric controls like manual white balance if your housing has them. If you get a feel for the shots here, they’ll feel much more natural underwater. You get extra credit if you wear a mask and flippers into a smoky blue-lit bar to simulate underwater conditions.

Try your video lights in dark conditions. To look even weirder, hook up video lights if you have them and go out at night or skulk around in the basement to shoot video with lights. (If your lights are really heavy you might want to skip this to save your hands and wrists.) Try to position the lights correctly for close subjects and try to get an even light spread. A couple of important things to remember: Underwater the lighting will be significantly diminished, so don’t expect this to be an exact exercise. And many video lights were designed principally for underwater use and can only be turned on for brief periods above water without blowing up or melting down. Find out about the limitations of your lights before turning them on. (This is where that bit about manual reading might actually come in handy.)

Try attaching a tripod or monopod and shooting more video. If your housing has a tripod socket and you shoot with a tripod (or monopod), try setting up your housing on the tripod, adding weights to the tripod if you use weights, and smoothly aiming your housing. Practice setting up and tearing down the tripod so it takes place quickly. A word of caution: underwater housings are designed to be close to neutrally buoyant in the water, but here on dry land they’re heavy and clunky. If your housing is off-balance or your tripod is a little flimsy, skip this exercise so your housing doesn’t end up making dents in the hard ground.

Keep a list of everything that goes wrong. All this work in dry dock is a great way to ferret out problems with your camcorder and housing before you go on your trip. If you start these exercises a month before you go, you’ll have time to send your equipment in for repair work if anything serious pops up. You may also come up with a list of extra supplies you need: silicon grease for o-rings, more video tape, and so on.

Once your dive trip comes around and it’s time to hit that aquatic concert hall, your housing should no longer feel like trying to hold an insubordinate eel in your hands. This leaves you free to concentrate on other, more important problems—like why fish always show you their butts when you really want a portrait of their faces.

Mike Boom shoots underwater video in northern California, Hawaii, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands. He's written about videography for Rodale's Scuba Diving magazine. You can contact him at lens@geekworks.net.

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