After finishing up at Aquarius, I spent a few days in the Keys diving with friends and catching up on sleep! I met with our Florida Coordinator Captain Slate for lunch and checked out his Atlantis Dive center. After what felt like a very, very short weekend, I was on my way North to Fort Lauderdale to visit Ryan Canon at Reef Photo & Video before starting my PADI Instructor Development Course.
The Reef store is definitely unassuming. A front showroom no bigger than my bedroom handles their walk-in clients and customers, but as their client base is 90% online, their store is proportioned to match. Walk behind the Employees Only sign and prepare to enter a fairytale wonderland of underwater camera equipment as far as the eye can see (perhaps I’m exaggerating, but it certainly felt that way). I’ll be the first to admit that I do my fair share of geeking out when it comes to dive equipment (you’ll remember my enthusiasm for the 300 sets of scuba gear at Aquarius). But my love for scuba gear pales in comparison to my obsession with underwater photo & video equipment.
After I took a few minutes to peruse the aisles of top-of-the-line underwater housings, strobes and accessories (all the while trying to stem the persistent flow of drool), Ryan set me up in the back shop with Shen and Tony to learn about the custom jobs and repairs that Reef is famous for. I love working with my hands. I’m a happy camper when I’ve got a pile of regulators that need servicing. I’ve got no problem opening up a regulator model I’ve never seen before and having a play around inside – after all they’re all pretty much the same (although most would agree that it would be prudent to have someone who is familiar with it around when I put it back together…). Cameras, on the other hand, quite frankly scare the crap out of me. I think I’ve had nightmares about having to pull a camera apart to fix it. Now at Reef there isn’t much actual camera surgery, but there are plenty of adjustments, tweaks and fixes to the camera housings, many of which have complex electronic parts that are equally nightmare inspiring for me. Thanks to these camera wizards, I was able to overcome my fear of playing around inside really expensive things.
Reef is the go-to store if you’re looking for a custom job on your underwater housing. For example, one customer was having a pole-cam setup installed in their housing while I was in the store. There’s not really a ‘pole-cam kit’ that you can purchase and plug into your housing next time you’re heading to the Bahamas to photograph a toothy feeding frenzy, so everything has to be made from scratch. This means splicing remote shutter-release triggers into underwater cables and bulkheads, soldering and waterproofing connections, and keeping everything streamlined enough that it can fit in the minimal airspaces inside the camera’s housing. All of which Shen did with the precision of a brain-surgeon.
Meanwhile, Tony was working on customizing one of Reef’s in-house Zen domes to a specific camera/lens setup. The close-focus wide-angle dome ports have taken the underwater photography industry by storm (I like to think of the tiny little domes as ‘Mickey Mouse Ports’). Combined with a fisheye lens, the dome allows for almost-touching-the-glass focusing in conjunction with a dramatic wide-angle image. Plus, because it’s so small and still allows for fantastic standard wide-angle images, it’s a traveling photographer’s dream! Reef also has mounts for the dome on almost every brand of camera housing, and they’ll customize the setup to fit essentially any camera/housing/lens combination, which is what Tony was busy working on.
All of the Zen domes are assembled in-house. The glass is precision ground elsewhere, but once all of the parts are made everything is put together by hand in the Fort Lauderdale shop, and not on an assembly line in China! Naturally, I had to have a go, just to say I’ve put a dome port together. It’s a shockingly simple combination: mount + glass + o-ring + a little bit of love = dome port. Buy a Zen dome port from Reef Photo & Video and who knows, it might just have been crafted by yours truly.
Ryan’s built the East Coast’s top underwater photography and video store, and Reef is by far the best option if you’re looking to do something crazy to your underwater housing, wherever you might be in the world.
