November 12-16th at Isla Guadalupe, MX on The Islander with Shark Divers

I had the opportunity to join a shark diving trip last week for teh last boat of the season down there. The trip was rather unique in that a film crew had joined us as well as some fairly notable experts with respect to either oceanic research or conservation. I tried to highlight those stories in some of the posts below, as I think they have some incredibly worthwhile messages to get out.

From an imaging standpoint I had originally planned on using the 7D with a case from Ikelite - based on some conversations with them and trying to get the case to me in time. Of course, it shipped a day late and a dollar short (in this case, quite literally actually, arrives today in theory). But the folks at Marine Camera (I found them on the sidebar here), who I ordered the case from got me all hooked up with a 5D and case for the trip - which I am grateful.

A couple of photo things for great whites - I used a 20m lens, which worked great, though because of the lower number of sharks having a little more zoom would have been handy. But, for any other trip I couldn't have gone wrong. The pro's that were on board were also shooting 20m as well. I went strobe-less for the first two days, but then switched to strobes for the last after one of the Pro's hooked me up with two strobes. I actually had strobes with me, but he placed some rather nice ones on there, so I wasn't about to argue.

Anyway, here's my lengthly trip report with tons and tons of pictures:

Day 1: The journey to the island
Day 2: Arrival at the island and the first day in the water
Day 3: Great White Sharks – woot!
Day 4: Sea Lions and Great White Sharks – double woot!
Day 5: The journey back to land and the trip home

(Oh, on the last page there I list all the cameras I took along with all the lenses and case I had)

You can either skip right to a certain page, or simply start at the begining and then there's little 'next' buttons at the bottom of each page.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ping or comment below - I'm always down for helping out. This was basically my first underwater photo taking trip and so I'm still learning a lot about taking pictures underwater.

Heres a couple of preview pics attached:

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Thanks, that has to be the most extensive trip report I've ever seen posted. Glad you had a good trip.

Cheers,
Steve

Excellent report. We have been wanting to do that trip for a while. Thanks for all of the details.

If you had been able to have the 7D in an Ikelite housing, what zoom lens you think would have been ideal for the great white shark shots?

Thanks for the great report .

Bo

For the 7d, If I were shooting it at Guadalupe, Id have been using either the Tokina 10-17 if the sharks were coming in close, or the Canon 17-40 is they were being standoffish. The 17-40 is a nice lens...but at the equivalent of 27...its not very wide if the sharks are coming in close as they often do. Murphys law, so bring multiple choices!

Funny, the Ikelite (7D) housing came yesterday...

I had planned on using a Canon 10-22 - and I think that would have worked perfectly had the sharks been around. The 20m lens that I had in the 5D worked fairly well, but that's full frame. Had I had a crop (7D) it may have been a bit far in.

But again, it really depends on the activity of the sharks. I actually rented two other lenses as well at varying zoom ranges to cover in that scenario. There are some incredible deals out there for renting really nice lenses for a week+ at super cheap rates. I think for any other exotic vacations I do I'm going to do that. In the last page (day) of my trip report I have some links to places to look at.