The camera system was designed to be an ‘off-the-shelf’, affordable and easy-to-use underwater video system for the rapid survey of benthic habitats to depths of 1 000 metres. The Azores team have been using the system to map the marine environment around the Azores since 2019 and published an open access manuscript about the camera system in 2021 (https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/2041-210X.13617). Having proved its effectiveness, they then reached out to South Atlantic partners and fellows through the iAtlantic project to provide a training workshop on how to build, operate and troubleshoot the Azor drift-cam.

Being the newly appointed instrument technician for the SAEON Egagasini Node’s Biodiversity Hub, it was with growing excitement that I listened to Dr Lara Atkinson’s advice to apply to attend the workshop. A few days after submitting my application, workshop invitations were sent and preparations to attend began… success!

It is worth mentioning that the month (and a bit) leading up to the workshop included a safety at sea course, preparation for my first research cruise as a SAEON technician as well as passport and visa applications. Fortunately, plenty of advice and administrative support were provided. Eventually, two missed and three successful flights later, Mari-Lise Franken (PhD student at the University of Cape Town) and I arrived safely in Horta, Azores where the workshop was to be held, albeit a day late.

‘Frame-to-footage’ rundown 

Despite the initial panic caused by arriving a day later than intended, we were pleased to discover that the Azores workshop team were incredibly accommodating and had swiftly restructured the workshop so that those arriving late would not miss a thing. All in all, 12 iAtlantic participants hailing from South Africa, Brazil and the United Kingdom were introduced to the Azor drift-cam system. We were given a breakdown of its development process, guiding principles, performance since its first deployment, general cost of components and issues the team had faced while exploring the deep-sea benthic habitats around the islands of the Azores.

One of the guiding principles behind the system that the Azores team wanted to emphasise, was that it did not require technical expertise to construct, operate and maintain. To this end, after the initial introduction to the system concluded, the next two days were focused solely on constructing functioning replicas of the system. What the participants were not aware of was the fact that this would entail being provided with an empty steel frame, a table of components, a box of tools and an instruction manual.

What followed were two intense days of bolting, screwing, cutting, soldering and connecting, all under the guidance of the Azores team that developed the system. The result? Two fully functioning Azor drift-cam replica systems, ready for deployment and built by researchers, postgraduate students and technicians that had only seen the camera for the first time the morning prior.