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Water and digital cameras don’t mix. If you drop a digital SLR into the water, you might as well just leave it there and hope that insurance will cover the replacement costs. Yet recently I’ve been dunking a camera into all sorts of water. Of course, this isn’t any ordinary camera, but a compact and waterproof, point-and-shoot digital camera.

Olympus and Pentax have been making great waterproof digital cameras for a while now. My daughter received a Pentax Optio W10 waterproof digital camera a few years ago as a high-school graduation present. She started dunking it into water right away, starting with a saltwater touch tank at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. She loves anything having to do with the ocean, and her use of the camera in that touch tank really startled a few people. “Aren’t you going to hurt that camera?”

Salt water is especially a problem, so this was a real test for her camera, and it worked great. Since then, she has used it to photograph sharks and rays in the touch tanks at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif., where she was a summer education intern.

I liked this idea, but I wanted to apply it to real-world situations in nature. I thought it would be interesting to try photographing below the surface of a pond, under the surface of a lake, down at water level in a stream and so forth.

Then I got the Olympus Stylus 1030 SW. It seemed like the waterproof camera that I had been looking for—waterproof down to 33 feet and shockproof from a drop of six feet. Not that I had any intention of doing either one of those things, but this meant that the camera could handle tougher wet conditions, such as a running stream or waves in the ocean.

This camera, like all of the point-and-shoot waterproof digital cameras, is quite small and fits in your pocket. It also fit in my camera bag without displacing any of my other gear. It became another option for photography, not just a special-use camera.

Dewitt Jones talks about small compact digital cameras in terms of the new possibilities of photography that they offer photographers. I like his idea that these should be thought of as adding a lens to your camera package, rather than buying a new camera. In a sense, that’s exactly what special digital cameras do—they offer new capabilities for your photography.

With most compact digital cameras now offering 8 megapixels and more, these cameras have plenty of resolution. I know a number of pros, such as Dewitt, who regularly use these cameras because they allow the photographer to do something they can’t easily do with a digital SLR.

I took the 1030 SW with me on an assignment to shoot an area of great biodiversity beside the Apalachicola River in Florida. Part of my work was to capture some of the ecosystem restoration work that had been done on a seep stream. These streams literally seep out of the sand in steep ravines, sort of like a spring, and are very clear. To give a little more variety to my photography, I dunked the waterproof camera into a variety of locations to show what was going on below the surface.

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