Why Your Camera Rig's Buoyancy Matters More Than You Think

If you have been shooting underwater for any length of time, you know that the best images come when things feel effortless. Many of the greatest underwater shooters make it look easy; their buoyancy seems completely natural. The last thing they are thinking about is knocking into coral or disturbing the sand—it is second nature to them. People talk about their own buoyancy all the time and how they are working to improve it to help with their photography.

What surprises me is how little that conversation extends to our camera rigs. We spend thousands on housings, ports, and strobes, then wonder why our diving feels harder than it used to. The answer, in most cases, is sitting right there in our hands. No matter what lens configuration or lighting system I am using, I can let go of my camera in the water column and it will pretty much sit there all on its own. This alone makes my photography so much easier.

How Camera Rigs Have Changed

The mirrorless revolution has been genuinely transformative for underwater photographers. Compact, travel-friendly bodies from Sony and Olympus have made it easier than ever to pack a serious imaging system into a bag and get on a plane. Furthermore, the housings for these smaller mirrorless cameras are sleeker and more ergonomic than anything we had in the DSLR era.

But there is a trade-off that rarely gets discussed: those smaller, more streamlined systems displace significantly less water than the big, chunky DSLR housings of a decade ago. Less displacement means less inherent buoyancy; the housing is no longer doing the heavy lifting for you.

At the same time, our optics have gotten heavier. Significantly heavier.

The Nauticam WACP-1 and FCP are a genuine leap forward in wide-angle underwater image quality and versatility over our old fisheyes and large domes. Water-contact optics eliminate the conventional issues of domes, delivering corner-to-corner sharpness and allowing us to use zoom lens ranges that were previously impossible. The results are exceptional. The weight, however, is not.

New strobes have become more and more powerful, and with that, their size and weight have also increased. Two of the most popular strobes today are the Retra Pro Max and the Backscatter HF-1—incredible strobes that are far beyond the Inon Z-240s of yesteryear. But this power comes at a price of weight and bulk.

The WACP-1 weighs around 3.5 kg (7.7 lbs) in air. The FCP comes in at roughly 2.3 kg (5.1 lbs). Add a mirrorless housing, twin strobes, and arms, and you are now carrying a rig that is heavier in the water than almost anything divers carried in the DSLR era—while simultaneously benefiting from far less built-in buoyancy.

The large acrylic dome ports that dominated wide-angle shooting for years, especially models like the Nauticam 8.5-inch (21.6 cm), were, in buoyancy terms, essentially giant floats attached to your housing. Their sheer volume pushed back against the water with considerable force, counteracting the weight of strobes and hardware. The move to water-contact ports and smaller glass domes has stripped that away entirely.

The result is a generation of photographers diving with rigs that are substantially heavier and less buoyant than what they used before—and many of them haven't connected the dots yet.

What a Heavy Rig Actually Does to Your Diving

This is where it gets interesting, because the effects of a negatively buoyant rig are not just physical. They cascade through your entire dive.

The most immediate problem is fatigue. Your arms are working constantly to support the weight of the system. That means your core is engaged, your breathing becomes less controlled, and your buoyancy—which depends on smooth, measured breathing—suffers. Over a long dive, that fatigue compounds quickly.

The second problem is positional control. A negatively buoyant rig pulls your front end down. To compensate, most photographers end up kicking more than they should or angling their body in ways that disturb the substrate. In muck diving environments like Lembeh Strait, that is fatal to your photography. One misplaced fin kick and the whole scene disappears into a cloud of silt.

The third problem—and arguably the most damaging—is the bad habits it encourages. When your rig is making it hard to hover, you start reaching for things: the reef, the sand, the rocks. It happens without you even realizing it. These are behaviors that no serious photographer would consciously choose, but they happen when the physical demand of the rig overwhelms your ability to maintain clean, controlled positioning.

And then there is the creative cost. When you are fighting your gear, you are not thinking about light, composition, animal behavior, or timing. You are thinking about not sinking, about not damaging the reef, and about how tired your arms are. You find yourself just wanting to take the shot quickly so you can rest, rather than focusing on how to get yourself into the perfect position for your best composition.

The Number One Piece of Gear at My Recent Lembeh Workshop

On my most recent Lembeh workshop, I brought along many gadgets for people to try—from strobes and lenses to lights, filters, and backgrounds. But my set of Kraken adjustable buoyancy arms was the number one item I loaned out. Every time I lent them to someone, they immediately wanted to borrow them again, and others asked to try them once they heard the benefits of an easier-to-handle rig. In fact, every time I lent them out, I immediately regretted it as my own rig became harder to handle! But everyone adored them. It was incredibly liberating for people to experience a rig that was no longer dragging them down.

The response was immediate, and it was unanimous. Across the entire trip, the Kraken buoyancy arms were the single most talked-about piece of gear. Several of my guests have subsequently purchased these arms since returning home.

The Kraken Adjustable Buoyancy Arms

The buoyancy arms I use and recommend are made by Kraken, and their adjustable design is the key to their effectiveness. Buoyancy arms are not a new concept—simple foam float arms have been around for years—but the ability to dial in precisely how much lift you are adding gives the Kraken arms a versatility that fixed solutions simply cannot match.

This matters because, increasingly, we use a wide variety of lenses underwater. (You can read the article I wrote on why you need so many different lenses that all seem to do the same job). Each of these configurations changes the buoyancy of your camera, and having adjustable buoyancy means I can just set it at the beginning of the dive and forget about it.

The other thing I like about the Kraken arms is that when I partner them up with my Nauticam carbon float arms, they offer an extraordinary amount of buoyancy—more than I could ever need—so they always have to be trimmed down. Many alternative solutions simply don’t offer enough buoyancy for modern rigs.

To be very clear, though, any buoyancy solution can work. You just need to ensure that you have enough of it and that you understand exactly how much you need for each of your lens setups, because a positively buoyant camera can be just as much of a hindrance as a negatively buoyant one.

How do they work?

The arms are hollow carbon tubes that offer 680 g (1.5 lbs) of lift each, but they feature a built-in valve at the top of the arm that allows you to flood them to obtain optimal buoyancy for your rig.

Essentially, once you get into the water, you press a spring-loaded button at the top of each arm. Pressing it opens the valve, allowing water to enter and displace the air, which reduces the amount of lift. The longer you hold the valve, the more they flood and the more negative your camera becomes. When you stop pressing, the spring closes the valve, and the arms remain at whatever buoyancy level you just set.

Because they are made of carbon fiber rather than a compressible material, that buoyancy will not change again, no matter how deep you go on the dive.

To "reset" the buoyancy once you are back on the surface, you simply remove the screw cap on each arm and empty the water out, bringing you right back to a full 680 g (1.5 lbs) of buoyancy per arm.

Remember, though, if you flood them too much underwater and your housing becomes negative, you cannot add air back into them while submerged to reset things; that must be done on the surface. Usually, I keep a single gear configuration for the day, so once the arms are dialed in on dive one, you can leave them exactly like that until you change your lens or port setup.

Buoyancy Is a Creative Tool

We tend to talk about buoyancy as a safety and environmental concern, which it absolutely is. But for underwater photographers, it is just as much a creative concern.

Every piece of equipment that makes it easier to achieve that control is, ultimately, a creative tool. The Kraken adjustable buoyancy arms will not appear in any sensor resolution comparison or lens sharpness test. Yet in the camera room in Lembeh, after hearing about guests go from fighting their rigs to hovering effortlessly over the black sand within a single dive, it was clear that the effect on their photography was more significant than any other piece of gear they tried on the entire trip.

Patience Rewards

I often spend 10 minutes or more looking strictly through the viewfinder of my camera, completely locked into my subject, waiting for the peak of the action or that magic moment. I do this with both wide-angle and macro shooting, and it is simply impossible to do without a neutral rig—just as it would be impossible if I, as the diver, were not perfectly neutral. I cannot express enough just how beneficial a neutral rig will be to your photography.

If you don’t have the Kraken buoyancy arms but still want to make sure that your camera rig is neutrally buoyant, check out our article on how to calculate it out before you head out on your next dive trip.