Alleviating underwater digital camera fogging.

Posted by Chris on July 30, 2003 at 14:14:34:

One of the problems with underwater digital photography is fogging on the inside of the lens port. I believe this problem is especially severe with the plastic housings, since the best heat conductor from inside to out is the fluorite glass port.
Any residual moisture in the camera vaporizes as the camera heats up during use. To minimize this problem one needs to both minimize the heating, and minimize the available moisture. Minimizing heating is accomplished by reducing the power dissipation in the camera; this also produces the side benefit of increasing battery life.
To reduce power dissipation:

• If you use external strobes as slaves to the internal camera strobe, reduce the output power of your strobe to the lowest level the camera will allow.
• turn off the LCD display when not in use
• use quality high power batteries (more on this in another post)
• minimize the battery contact resistance (more on this in another post)