Travel-ready Think Tank Airport Security carry-ons

A while back I wrote an article about our carry-on luggage for two dSLR housings. Since the Storm Cases combined could only fit a single flat port and small dome port, all other ports (including some Aquatica 8" ports and port shades) had to be packed in our checked luggage. I assumed a bunch of ports would have little or no value to thieves. Well, a connecting flight through San Juan proved me wrong. They stole five ports, including two limited edition Ikelite-Aquatica dome ports with port shades. I later found one of the Ikelite-Aquatica ports bundled with a housing for sale on eBay. You can read part of the story in our Bonaire in October 2005 trip report. Hopefully the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and TSA will put an end to the thefts in San Juan, but I'm not holding my breath. So meanwhile, I went looking for larger carry-ons -- ones that could potentially accomodate our newly purchased, and redesigned, Ikelite 8 inch ports.

Ikelite released a new 8 inch dome port several months ago that accepts up to three different stalk lengths. I wrote a review of this new dome port -- although it remains a draft until I can finish sorting / post-processing a backlog of photos. :-) In August, Ikelite announced an upgrade to their medium and long stalk lengths for this port. The original stalks are rated to 150 ft, while the new stalks are rated to 200 ft. Ikelite is offering a free exchange for the old stalks, so if you have some, you may want to take advantage of this offer sooner than later.

Please note: I started writing this article shortly after returning from Bonaire in June, but have not had a chance to complete it yet. Hopefully this draft version will be useful for those of you currently looking at buying Ike's new 8" dome port. I expect to have this article completed (with example photos) within the next few weeks.

A Little Background Info...

To truly appreciate the current 8" port design, it's necessary to talk about it's predecessor...

Over a year ago, Ikelite purchased four hundred 8" ports from Aquatica, and packaged them with custom delrin adapters. I bought two of these 8" dome ports #5510.80 for our Ikelite Canon 20D housings. I also bought some Aquatica WA port shades to minimize lens flare, and to protect the port from accidental contact with rocks / coral during entry.

I noticed that the delrin adapter sat a little looser in the port opening than Ikelite's regular ports. Brett from Ikelite explained that since the adapters were machined, they were truer than Ikelite's other molded ports, so this was in fact normal. Still, with the added weight of the WA port shade, I decided to be extra careful during entry not to bump the port -- just in case. A few months ago one of our housings flooded. The port seal failed completely as I put the housing in the water. The port and o-ring were installed properly, and the housing had already been on one dive that day. I expect several factors were at work to break the port seal, including strong surge, waves, the buoyant nature of the port, and the two port clips (that allow the port to wobble on a single axis within the port opening).

Housing buoyancy has been a problem for just about every photographer I've met, including myself. Compact strobes like the DS-125s pictured here are very compact, and thus very negative underwater. It takes air filled spaces to offset the negative weight of batteries, lenses, cameras, etc. When shooting wide-angle, the large diameter of a dome port will help offset some of the weight. ULCS and others also offer buoyant strobe arms of various lengths. The longer the arms, the more lift is achieved. This is all great for wide angle, and indeed, our wide-angle setup is close to neutral and a real pleasure to use. The opposite is true for a macro setup though - especially at night. You can see a typical night macro configuration in this picture -- swap the large wide-angle dome port for a compact flat port, long buoyant strobe arms for short ones, add a flashlight with batteries, and you can see how such a housing setup would be a real brick underwater.

I purchased the EKPP Double Edition DVD from Herve Deschamp that documents the Doux de Coly and Gourneyras cave dives by the EKPP in 2002/2003. When I tried viewing the Doux de Coly disc, my DVD player flashed a warning about an improper region code and would not play the disc. Not without some resources, I proceeded to copy the disc and remove the region coding. The copy didn't work either, so I tried to re-author the disc and even tried region coding it for North America. None of my attempts succeeded. After scrapping four blanks, I contacted Herve Deschamp for an exchange or refund. Herve replied by calling me a liar and accusing me of trying to steal his DVD! Figuring I must have caught him on a really bad day, so I proceeded to re-explain the situation, and even went so far as to take an mpeg video of the error. Still Herve continued to call me a thief and a liar, refusing to consider an exchange or refund. This is definately a situation of buyer beware. I now find myself with the unpleasant task of having to warn others of this seriously bad customer experience. The DVD may work fine for you, but if it doesn't, you can probably expect a response like the following.

This latest trip to Bonaire has been the best, and the worst.

We woke up at 2:00am on October 15th for a very early morning flight to Bonaire. Eric and Sebastien met us at the airport and we all had a great time on our way down through Miami and San Juan. We had pizza and took plenty of pictures in Miami. Sebastien is an especially fun subject since he doesn't like to be photographed. :-) We all slept a little bit on the flights and had a take-out dinner (by the seaside) of sausages from the Argentinian Grill. Sunday morning we had an early breakfast at the City Cafe and then picked up some groceries from the Cultimara. We dove the Calabas II reef behind the Carib Inn that afternoon, and continued to dive 2-3 times a day for the next 3 weeks...

In early 2005, Melanie and I upgraded our photo equipment to Canon 20Ds with Ikelite housings, ports, and substrobes. On a trip to Bonaire in May 2005, we had the occasion to try a variety of lenses and port combinations. Excluding all the various support and spare parts we brought along, our underwater photography equipment consisted of: