John Kendal

John Kendall is a GUE technical, cave and CCR instructor and a Fellow of the Explorers Club living in the UK. Since he was a small child, John has been fascinated by the underwater environment and the possibilities of adventure, and he is grateful to GUE for helping him to turn those childhood dreams into reality. As an instructor, John regularly travels around the world teaching GUE classes and helping to build local GUE communities. He is also the project manager for Project Baseline Malta. For the last 4 years, John has been working with underwater 3D Photogrammetry as a technique for nautical archaeology. This cutting edge technique allows for digital 3D models to be created of shipwrecks, and allow researchers and scientists unparalleled abilities to manipulate and navigate the sites from the comfort of their own computers. From the frigid waters of the Baltic to the toasty Mediterranean sea, John and GUE have been accumulating data and generating some cool looking imagery of deep water wrecks, and John is going to share some of it with us.  When not diving (which is rare), John is also a commercially qualified UAV pilot.

Much of my project diving is between 90 and 130m deep. We have short time periods to capture the imagery that we need, and need camera housings that not only keep the water out, but enable us to change settings easily at great depths. I first used an Easydive housing on a project in Sicily diving to 110m, It was super easy to find the controls I needed. Following this, I bought my own Leo3 for my Canon SLRs. The ability to put different camera bodies into the same housing for different dives, yet maintain the same muscle memory of where all the buttons are to change settings is perfect. I do a lot of Photogrammetry, which involves capturing hundreds or thousands of images per dive, Easydive went above and beyond, and created a custom shooting mode for me that adds an intervalometer to the standard firmware in my Leo3 that I can switch into and out of underwater.