The Setup ⚙️

The setup I’ve used consists of:

• iPhone 14 Pro
• DIVEVOLK SeaTouch 4 housing, upgraded later to a SeaTouch 4 MAX Platinum
• SeaLife Sea Dragon 2500 lumen video light
• Red filter

This was the second setup I used after I switched from a SeaLife SportDiver case to DIVEVOLK’s touch enabled casings. The appeal of the system is that there are no electronics or third party apps that may fail during a dive trip. I also found the third party camera app developed by SeaLife to be a little behind the native camera app of the phone. For instance in the SeaLife app I experienced freezing and features like slow-motion recording were not possible at the time.

Impressions 💭

Using the SeaTouch 4 is extremely easy – using an insert specific for your phone you simply slide it into the casing and tighten two thumbscrews to seal the casing and you are good to go. While the membrane does degrade the touch sensitivity significantly, tasks such as opening the camera app, switching lenses or opening the photo gallery are straight forward.

I also really like that the housing is rated for 60m which would allow you to bring it on tech dives if you decide to get into decompression diving, who wouldn’t want some entertainment on long decompression stops?

One thing that I dislike is that the regular SeaTouch 4 housing does not have any way to attach it to a tray or to add filters or dioptors. Instead you have to buy a clamp accessory which adds bulk and I’ve even heard stories of the clamp coming loose causing the housing to separate from the tray – plummeting into the depths. Not needing the clamp is marketed as one of the features of the platinum version, but I feel that this is a reasonable feature to expect on even the entry level housing.

Samples 📷

I’ve included some of my favorite shots taken with my IPhone 14 Pro inside of the casing. Most of the pictures are taken in Bunaken, Raja Ampat, Lembeh and Malapascua. All the photos are edited in Lightroom to give an idea of what you can achieve with a phone camera.

Shooting at wide angle you do notice that the corners are not particularly sharp. I am not sure if this is because the camera lenses sit behind a flat piece of glass, a limitation of the cameras optics or both. Zooming in to the pictures you do notice some softness, but I think a lot of people would be satisfied with overall image quality when looking at the photos on their phones or a laptop screen.

One thing that I really appreciate about using a phone casing is its small size that allows you to get close to many types of subjects – even ones that are hiding inside the reef. With my full-frame rig I often struggle getting the camera close enough to the subject due to tray and the strobe arms. Below are some close-ups of various frogfish species.

And finally, who doesn’t like some cephalopods.

Macro 🔬

Traditionally, underwater photographers needed to make the choice between using a wide angle or a macro lens before a dive. Interestingly, many modern phones sport a lens capable of taking macro shots. I found that the macro functionality on the iPhone 14 Pro was able to capture the vast majority of subjects, even tiny ones measuring only a few mm’s like the leaf slug below.

Underwater panoramas 🪸

It is also possible to use other camera features such as in-phone panoramas. This one was taken at Melissa’s garden dive site in Raja Ampat, known for its stunning formations of staghorn corals. I’m surprised at how well it turned out, it being a candid shot of the diver. If you zoom in on the diver you can see some areas where the stitching has produced artifacts in particular on the tank.

Video 📹

One area where the iPhone 14 Pro really shines through is in its ability to record 4K 60fps video. The optics of the phone have never been exceptional, but this is less of a problem when the subject is moving around in a video than it is for still photos.

Surprisingly I found that there is little practical difference in optical quality between taking a frame out of a 4K video and a still photo taken by the phone. In fact the image of a thresher shark above is a still taken from a video.

The longer I’ve shot with this system the more I find myself shooting video rather than photos. I’ve also come to realize that a lot of well camouflaged sea creatures are more interesting to shoot on video due to their subtle movements which cannot be captured in a still.

Flooding ⚠️

Over time I have owned 3 different DIVEVOLK housings. The first I owned for around a year and did more than 50 dives with it without any problem. I sold the first one to a friend and replaced it with one of their platinum housings. Unfortunately that one started to flood through the corner of the rubber membrane after just a few dives, flooding my phone in the process. The process to get it replaced by DIVEVOLK took more than a month and I had to contact them through multiple channels to initiate it.
I used the new unit for a couple of dives with no problems but ended up selling it because I had just bought a housing for my mirrorless camera.

I thought no more of it until the person that I sold my first housing to contacted me – turns out that the membrane had also started leaking on her housing. Considering it had been more than a year and that it had been through numerous dives since then I was not shocked to hear that a delicate part like the membrane had started to leak. Out of curiosity I contacted the person I sold my platinum housing to to hear if she had also experienced any issues. More concerningly it turns out that the newly replaced platinum housing I had sold her had flooded during one of her first dives, destroying her phone in the process.

It could be pure coincidence, but it seems like the membrane on the two platinum housings I owned were problematic – failing after just a few dives. There are people out there that claim to have hundreds of dives on the housings without any issues so it is difficult to tell if this is a general issue or a problem of a specific batch.

Conclusion 📃

I really enjoyed the simplicity of using a phone inside the DIVEVOLK housing; the big screen for framing subjects, its macro capabilities and not needing to transfer images. The cameras and software in phones are only getting better so a product like the SeaTouch housing is a brilliant way to leverage the downstream advances in technology without having to invest in developing a new product.

The elephant in the room is the very real risk of a leak and the consequence it has when your phone is inside the housing. That being said I think these issues can be addressed through improvement of the design and the materials they use. It is a new product that is being sold at high volume so you would expect the product to improve a few iterations down the line.

One thing that I would really like to see is the ability to sync strobes with the phone’s camera. While a video light in itself makes a world of difference it cannot hope to match the power output of a strobe – which could potentially be a game changer for UW photography using phones.

If you have any questions or want to connect feel free to contact me on Instagram – I am always happy to talk about diving and UW photography.

Happy shooting!