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Underwater cameras

The use of underwater cameras was made necessary to monitor the Museum's vicinity.

An amazing facet of underwater photography is the ability to have a panorama of a reef and its ecosystem. Wide-angle photography makes this feasible. A wide-angle lens is needed for this type of photography. Also, powerful strobes are needed because the field of view caught on film is larger and needs to be bright. Wide-angle shots are best taken with wide-angle specific lenses.

The Museum stands over the length of an abrupt rocky cliff diving very steeply into the sea; one reaches a depth one reaches a depth of thirty metres about 450 feet from the shore.

Lashed by high-sea swells and populated by pelagic species, this area has been badly damaged by the outpouring of quarry materials and especially by the refuse from a slaughterhouse in operation between 1914 and 1962 . The original associations had been deeply altered and even sometimes totally eliminated (like the seagrass bed) by various types of pollution.

Recently, it has been colonized extensively by an exotic bed of green algae belonging to the species Caulerpa taxifolia.This was the interest of the real time study of the life inside a caulerpa bed which gave the idea, in the Spring of 1993, to set up a convenient and efficient means of observation enabling to record scenes of underwater life without being disturbed by the intrusion of outside observers.

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