Fifteen years ago, traveling with an underwater camera meant carrying a dedicated camera system and housing along with all my scuba gear—two full suitcases and a carry-on bag. These days, the cost and aggravation of transporting that much equipment can pretty much ruin the idea of traveling at all.
Last year, I bought a DIVEVOLK SeaTouch 4 Max housing for my iPhone 15 Pro Max, along with a red filter and a few other little doohickeys I thought I might need. Compared with the cost of housing any of my APS-C, full-frame, or medium-format cameras, it was ridiculously inexpensive. So inexpensive that I reread the reviews to make sure the housing wasn’t made from Swiss cheese or cardboard.
Before 2023, I hadn’t been diving in eleven years. My dive gear—and I—were old, crusty, and out of practice. But getting back into the water with a camera was life-affirming and immediately comfortable, like getting back on a bicycle. By streamlining both my camera system and dive gear, I was also able to reduce the cost and stress of traveling to a single suitcase.
There was one problem.
It occurred to me that if the housing failed at depth, the phone inside it—my lifeline to the digital world and the place where I stored nearly everything I needed for the trip—would probably flood. Getting home could become interesting in all the wrong ways.
So I went to Back Market and bought a heavily used iPhone 14 Pro for about half the price of a new phone. That would become my underwater camera. If it didn’t work, I could still use the iPhone 15 and hope for the best.
Since buying the setup, I have photographed dives in the Florida caverns and on the reefs of Bonaire and Dominica, with no complaints whatsoever.
When I made this photograph, there was a fair amount of sargassum in the water, and visibility was cloudy. The original image was drained of color and predominantly blue. It was pleasing, but not quite the photograph I wanted.
The pilings already felt less like a human structure than an underwater forest, with the divers drifting between them like unfamiliar wildlife. I converted the photograph to black and white, then added a little clarity and contrast in Lightroom. The monochrome treatment separated the light, sediment, divers, and encrusted columns more clearly while preserving the murky atmosphere that first attracted me.
Although I had brought both a video light and a red filter, I found myself loving the black-and-white renderings from this location. Removing the color seemed to make the underwater world stranger, quieter, and somehow more timeless.
All in all, the DIVEVOLK housing—and my decision to trust an Apple phone as an underwater camera—has been one of my best photographic purchases in recent years. I love the results I am getting, and DIVEVOLK is firmly on my radar as I continue rebuilding my underwater photography system.
