Light & Motion has a history of creating innovative products. With the upcoming releases of two new products, the Bluefin HC3 and the Titan D200 camera housings, Light & Motion’s Chief Technical Officer, John Larkin, shared some things about how he and his team go about designing and producing products that rank some of the best in the world of underwater photography and videography.

John Larkin arrived at Light & Motion a year ago, after spending over a decade serving as the Director of Engineering for D2M, Inc and as Senior Product Designer for Apple Computer, Inc. He also served as a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University for eight years. John has a MS in Engineering from Stanford and a Bachelors degree in Physics from Pomona College both in California. His expertise has enabled him and his team to produce the highly successful Light & Motion FX1 and HC1 housings within the last year. Now they are in the midst of developing the highly anticipated D200 and HC3 housings for release in the near future.

What makes our products so exceptional compared to our competitors?
I’d say there are three main things that differentiate Light & Motion products. First is that we try to provide complete solutions for underwater imaging. Lights, optics, monitors, and housings need to work seamlessly together for the optimal user experience. Second, Light & Motion has a long history of pushing innovation. From something as simple as a Flip Down Color Correction Filter to our patented ROC strobe control, we are always looking to move the product line forward. And finally, as a company we are passionate about supporting the customer with the best available product and service.

With cameras changing so fast, how do you keep up and still innovate?
With our history in this business comes a selection of modular housing designs we can use to jumpstart a new design. I generally break our new designs into two classes, iterative designs and ground up designs. The Tetra 7070 is a good example of an iterative design. We based that one on the Tetra 5060 and only changed what needed to change to adapt it to the new camera. This allows these projects to go very quickly. On iterative design projects we can frequently get to market within a couple of months of the introduction of a new camera.

But there are camera changes that require deeper changes to our housing strategy. HDV represented a watershed event. HDV has 6x more resolution then standard definition. Optics and camera alignment became a big challenge. We took a little longer than our competitors, but our Flip Macro system was worth the wait.

The Bluefin FX1 represents a total redesign and this caused us to be late to the market compared to most of our competitors. Of course, this was a source of great discussion at Light & Motion. But in the end our culture demands that we produce the best product possible.

So we use a mix of strategies to keep up with the marketplace. The iterations allow us to get to market quickly most of the time and the deeper design projects allow us to respond to more fundamental changes.

How do you approach a big project? What is the process?
There are phases to the process. The first is the Concept phase in which we can come up with what we would like to do. This is where almost anything is possible. The second phase is the Investigative phase. Once we have the actual camera we’re able to enter this phase. This is the place to sort out the unknowns and come up with the real product plan. The next phase is the Detail Design phase. This is where the final form of the product is defined and prototyped. Then we take that prototype through the Validation phase for testing. Once the prototype passes the test we move on to the actual production and shipping of the product.

What can you tell us about the D200 and the HC3?
Both of these projects have made it to the investigation phase. So we know what we want to do and we are now sorting out what we really can do. The HC3 is sweet little camera. There are some changes to control locations and some new controls like “smooth slow motion” that we think will be great for underwater use. The Bluefin HC3 will be a like a compact Bluefin HC1.

We are getting ready to do something new with the D200 enclosure. We certainly plan to maintain industry wide compatibility with the ports and lens adapters we created for the D100 and will update the ROC strobe controls.

But the really big deal is that we will have true finger tip controls. For years video users have enjoyed an elegant user experience while photographers have been reaching and stretching to knobs and dials. Through an USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface, we are bringing the controls to the user. In technical design lingo, the controls will fall to hand. Other improvements include an electro-mechanical shutter release and a 1:1 viewfinder

What is the timeline for each of these products?
We hope to ship the HC3 by the end of May and the D200 sometime in August. We expect both of these housings to do really well in the market. As with all other Light & Motion products they will provide unique features that will allow underwater photographers and videographers more advantages that ever before.

Are there any trends in housings you see sweeping the market? Or improvements that will change the current landscape?
My impression is that the availability of quality underwater housings in the market is increasing. I think this is upping the ante on what it takes for companies to distinguish themselves from the competition. In the video space the advent of affordable high definition cameras is increasing the attractiveness of shooting underwater video. High def also increases the performance requirements on lenses and system components in general. On the photo side, the life cycle of cameras seems to be decreasing along with cost, while the quality and capabilities are increasing. I read somewhere that one way to look at the world of digital camera offerings is to view the lenses as the product and the camera bodies as the accessories. That rings true for me.

What kinds of advances (without sharing LMI secrets) in cameras/optics/housings are you hoping to see either near term or further out?
It isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest we will continue to see better and better camera performance in smaller and smaller housings. In terms of wishing for things, it would be great if the video camera makers would publish specs on how to electronically control their cameras.

How would describe the perfect housing?
The perfect housing would become an unnoticed extension of the user’s imaging intent. The strangeness of working with equipment in an underwater environment gets in the way of translating the photographers vision into a captured image. So you want a housing that doesn’t vary from camera to camera except where it needs to expand to give you more capabilities.

When you finish a new product and hold it in your hands, what about it gets you excited?
Well finishing is always fun. But I think what gets me excited about holding a new product is being on the verge of sharing it with users. We have rounds of prototypes where we try to refine our vision of what the product can and should be. We have exercised the cameras, tried out the optics, felt the click and thunk of the mechanisms. We really don’t want to be surprised when that first shippable product is available. But seeing if users share and accept and possibly appreciate our design is why we do this.

Would we know any of the Apple products you worked on?
The first product I worked on at Apple was the PowerBook 500 series. I got to do the mechanical design on the first version of the touchpad, the keyboard, top half of the base, and selection button. I was in portables during the transition to PowerPC chips in the mid 90’s. The last product I worked on was code named Hooper, aka the PowerBook 3400. Apple was a fun place to work and it provided a great education in the process of bringing innovative designs to the market.

Can you tell us a little about your diving history?
I learned to dive in 2000 in order to play on a family trip to Hawaii. Both my brothers were going along (my brother Eric was Light & Motion’s first CTO) and I’d always enjoyed snorkeling so it seemed like something I would enjoy. My wife and I took the classes together and we quickly discovered that diving filled a need to explore for both of us. We started traveling down to Monterey from our home in the Silicon Valley on the weekends to dive in the bay.. We actually are pretty conservative as divers. We don’t go the deepest, can’t stay down the longest, or use the latest and greatest gear. But we continually find renewal in the occasional moments of serene beauty we get while diving. Monterey is a fantastic place to dive. We liked it enough that we daydreamed about buying a second home down here that we could use as home base for our weekend dive trips. By the time my current position came open at Light & Motion, I was primed to make the move. Diving has made a huge impact in the enjoyment I find in life.

Is it true LMI requires the staff to dive?
Well, “requires” isn’t really accurate. We do encourage the staff to dive and use our equipment so they can better understand the challenges of capturing good images underwater. And we have set up Friday dive days where the design and sales staff can dive together and test equipment.

John, one last question, why do you like working at Light & Motion?
It’s great to work with products that already have such robust feature sets; we get to continue to improve on that. I also like that we’re a vertically integrated company with in-house manufacturing, which gives us much more quality control. I like the fact that we listen to our customers and react to their needs. We are also located in a dive-rich community which allows for great feedback from our users.

Not to mention I can walk to work and/or my wife and I can walk right down to the ocean and dive in the incredibly diverse and beautiful Monterey Bay whenever we want!

Thanks John!