Fluorescence photography needs to be done in darkness, so this usually means diving at night. We have built a custom 'dark-box' we call the UDF-28. It is designed for a Nikonos camera with 28 mm lens and the Nikonos close-up kit. The box replaces the framer that you would usually use with the close-up lens. The box fixes the camera at exactly the right distance from the subject, and the dimensions of the box opening are exactly the dimensions of the framer. The UDF-28 can also be used with the 35 mm lens and close-up kit, and you will just be photographing a smaller portion of the box opening. The unit is designed to use a pair of Ikelite Substrobe 50 electronic flashes.
The UDF-28 works best on flat surfaces so that ambient light is excluded. If the surface is very 3-dimensional ambient light will get in, as can be seen in some of the photographs on the New England benthos photo page.
The photographs here show what the UDF-28 looks like. The top two show the layout clearly. The bottom photo shows the finished unit in the field - the finished system includes two pieces of syntactic foam to achieve proper buoyancy, and a handle at the bottom of the box.
