Looking for ideas. Portable, inflatable camera float

PHXAZCRAIG wrote:

On a calm day, this would have worked OK, but there was so much wind and swells nobody could go in off the end of the pier as usual (and then come back in to the shallower area). I went in the shallow area, and could not get out to the end of the pier due to the waves, so I tried the over/under. Too much wave action to get the shot as I was barely able to stand more than a second. Here is all I got:

Just viewing the LCD can be a problem when half of it is underwater, and bright sun is out. The camera really needs to be in a neutral weight configuration for this.

I'm not a diver, but many times I've tried to get half-in/half-out photos like you're talking about... mostly with waterproof compacts, but also with film cameras years ago. It almost never works because the lens is tiny relative to the wave action....

So, my thinking is that it's more about providing a larger air/water interface area than it is about buoyancy. Thus, I'd be thinking in terms of having a large clear plastic plate some short distance in front of the camera. The camera flotation I have in mind would be shaped like a high-displacement boat hull, probably with a flat or cylindrically-curved plexiglass sheet as the transom. I'd probably make this boat be the waterproof housing, rather than a support for a housing -- in that way, it could be more compact and easier to access by wired/wireless tethered control.

As for making it portable, most of the structure could literally be inflatable. I wouldn't try building a first one that way, however. Many years ago, my Dad's company built a powerboat handling trainer (described this 2007 article in Power & Motor Yacht ), and I'd start with a similar construction.... Heck, I still have a stack of hulls and other parts for those in my garage!  Here's a photo from that article:

However, now that I think about it, it wouldn't be too hard to build a fairly small fully self-contained unit to do it that would be more like a camera array in a buoy. For that matter, are any of the 360-degree cameras viable as weighted floating balls?  The results from a floating ball would be quite different, but maybe nice?

Is there much demand for autonomous/remote-control surface camera systems? This wouldn't be too hard for me to do, but it falls in that awkward region of not being a very quick project and also not being something I'd be able to support as a research effort in my lab at the University of Kentucky.  Maybe as a senior project?