Rational man dives the LAR V rebreather in the kailua triangle

Equipment test: Which counts for more? your dive equipment, or your camera gear?
My basic philosophy is that if you use open circuit scuba, nothing will get close enough to you to get a good picture anyway.
That's where the LAR V comes in. Although primitive, this rebreather is an honest, completely closed unit.
Common sense and conventional wisdom says that you cannot take a pure oxygen rebreather below about 20 feet.
However, there is a secret Navy method that safely more than doubles this depth. I have used a non-approved method to more than quadruple this depth, but I don't want you to die, so I won't tell you how. (except in person, where we can show you.)
Anyway, the camera was pretty good, it ran out of room at between 50minutes and an hour, on a two gig chip.
About 15 minutes of it were pretty ok. I could not make out the picture on the back of the camera, so much of the shots were out of frame a little. I just held the camera out at arm's length much of the time, especially when there was no sand to sit in. There was a surge in the water, so I couldn't approach the reef too closely with my body. I also had no buoyancy device, as my secumar vest is something of a collector's item,I want to keep it pristine.
Anyway, the camera only can use up to a 2 gig chip, so for longer dives, you would have to take two or more cameras. It took me just over 2 hours to shoot less than one hour worth of video. In that length of time, I used about 80 BAR out of 200 BAR, (from a 1.5 liter bottle) so 2 cameras should do you good, unless you are diving a mod 25.
In any case, I doubt you would still feel like shooting video after 4 hours.
Overall, I thought the camera was worth the money, though the still shots were no better than the disposable film camera I also brought, they were no worse, either
About the only complaint I had was that its tiny size tended to exaggerate my bad cinematography skills
For example, the 3 second horizon scan of Kailua bay. What the hell was I thinking? There were no boats coming, Why didn't I stop and do a proper pan? I don't know. A larger camera would have forced me to do a slower, better pan. Not like that's a great excuse or anythng.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• rebreather
• lar
• underwater
• scuba
• LAR
• secumar
• kailua
• kona
• triangle
• boat
• wrecks
• pirate
• booty
• tropical
• fish
• atlantis
• submarine
• aloha
• big
• island
• hawaii
• dive
• diver
• diving