Fitter Sonny Castro sands rough areas after cutting off two unused brackets on the upper part of the camera tripod frame. The brackets were removed to reduce the possibility of entangling the line that goes from the ring to the floats and sediment traps above.

The insides of the time-lapse camera system. The canister houses a digital SLR camera and circuitry to allow pictures to be downloaded without removing the camera or memory card. Cables exit the back of the housing through special water-tight connectors. All of this is enclosed in a cylindrical titanium housing that was pressure-tested to 6,000 meters or about 9,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. When mounted on the camera frame, the cables run down from the camera to another pressure-rated housing that contains a bank of lithium batteries and a specialized microcontroller board that operates the camera and two separate strobe lights.

Seawater’s corrosive forces are evident in this extremely rusted steel bolt. The tripod is constructed of titanium that is highly resistant to corrosion, but junctions with other metals, such as this bolt, require consideration of the corrosive potential between the metals. The rusted steel bolt was replaced with a stainless steel one and insulated at the metal contact with plastic tubing.