While I'm still busy with the low power electronics, I'm trying to use the camera to get a feel for the capabilities and limitations... and to figure out how to make it user friendly. 

So over the last weekend I did two ~5hour drops, both from about 10:00 to 15:00 for the best lighting.

The first was a 30sec interval time-lapse at the entrance of a small cave. 

• Depth: ~2.5m
• Mode: Photo
• Interval: 30sec
• Exposure: 'Beach'

About two hours into the deployment, an octopus discovers the camera, fiddles with it and points it into the cave. Which is both delightful and frustrating. The time-lapse misses most of the action. The pipecamera does not deal with low light conditions that well at this stage :\

In case you missed it, here is the culprit:

The rest of the photos taken are very dark, fortunately there are some interesting fish hiding in the cave, but it's too dark to do a time-lapse of these photos. I will consider rather setting the exposure to 'auto' in the future to deal with such... interferances.

The second deployment was done from 10:30 - 15:30.

• Depth: ~1.5m
• Mode: Video
• Video lenght: 15min
• Interval: 15min
• Exposure: Auto

Because I missed so much action in the time-lapse the day before, I decided to just go with continuous video.

I placed the camera under a small overhang looking out to a small rocky outcrop. The camera eventually shifts in the surge, which is the reason for the skew video later on. I will need to look into adding a bit more weight in the future.

At first I thought the footage was pretty boring, but the problem with having 5 hours of footage is that you just skip through it, often missing some of the fun stuff that are only a few seconds long. The little outcrop actually got quite a few visitors.

After a second round of looking at the results (on recommendation from my video journalist wife), here are some of the highlights:

A school of fish visiting the deployment:

A cuttlefish hunting past the frame (LOVE IT):

Below I took a about a 10min snippet over two videos and converted it into a time-lapse. This is the kind of footage I'm interested in getting more of: