Every time I post a reel from a dive, the same comment shows up. Not "nice shot," not "what camera," but: what is that?
A tiny purple slug with orange horns. A fish that looks like it's wearing a mask. A shrimp sitting on a coral that nobody else on the boat noticed. After two years of filming the Red Sea on an iPhone in a DIVEVOLK underwater phone housing, I've answered that question hundreds of times, in comments, in DMs and on the dive boat. Eventually I decided to build something that answers it for everyone.
This is that story.
It Started With a Borrowed Housing and a Turtle
The first time I held a DIVEVOLK housing, it wasn't even mine. A friend brought one for me to try, and I took it on a shore dive in Makadi Bay, just south of Hurghada. Ten minutes in, we found a green sea turtle grazing on the seagrass, completely unbothered by us. I hovered next to it and filmed it quietly eating.
That clip became the very first video I made for DIVEVOLK, and it's still one of my favorites.
I've been diving since 2018. I live in Hurghada, I'm a PADI Divemaster and I dive about once a week. Before that dive, my underwater camera was an Olympus TG-6. It's a great little camera for macro stills, but its video never satisfied me, while the iPhone in my pocket was shooting beautiful video every single day on land. The turtle settled it. Soon after, DIVEVOLK sent me a SeaTouch 4 Max on my friend's recommendation, and since then almost everything I shoot underwater is on an iPhone 14 Pro Max.
Then the Questions Started
A phone changes what you share. The footage is on the device you post from, so I started posting a lot more: short reels after almost every dive.
Most of my diving is shallow, within 10 meters (about 33 feet), and most of what I film is macro: nudibranchs, small reef fish, shrimp, the life in the details of the reef. With a video light and DIVEVOLK's +18 super macro lens, the phone shows things that are hard to see even with your own eyes: coral polyps, and nudibranchs smaller than a grain of rice.
And that's exactly the kind of footage that makes people ask. Nobody asks what a turtle is. Everybody asks what the tiny purple thing is.
Here's the problem: the Red Sea has well over a thousand species of fish and invertebrates, and many of them look nearly identical to anyone who isn't a specialist. The Red Sea alone has dozens of nudibranch species. Even experienced divers mostly know the famous ones, and a generic "fish ID" search on the internet gives you species from the Caribbean or the Great Barrier Reef.
I Already Had Half the Answer
Besides diving, I'm a web and app developer. A few years ago I started Red Sea Creatures, a free field guide to the marine life of the Red Sea. Today it covers about 1,200 species, each with photos, identification marks, behavior notes and a fun fact or two, plus dive sites and dive centers around the region. It's on the web and in apps for iPhone and Android.
So when someone asked "what is that?", I'd search my own catalog, find the species and send the link. It worked, but it only worked because I knew roughly where to look. For someone who doesn't know whether they filmed a nudibranch or a flatworm, a catalog of 1,200 species is a wall.
What people needed wasn't a bigger book. They needed to point at their own footage and ask.
So I Built FishID
FishID is a feature of the Red Sea Creatures app that identifies marine life from your own photos and video.
You pick a shot from your gallery, a photo or a clip, and FishID suggests the most likely species, each linked to its full profile in the guide: what it is, how big it gets, where it lives, what it eats and how to tell it apart from its look-alikes. When it isn't certain about the exact species, it also shows the group it belongs to, so instead of a confident wrong answer you get a short list and a place to continue on your own.
Two things make it different from a general-purpose image search:
- It's built for the Red Sea. It compares your shot against photos of Red Sea species, not against every animal on the internet. If you dive here, the answers come from the animals you can actually meet here.
- It's built for real underwater footage. Divers don't bring back studio portraits. They bring back blue-tinted, slightly blurry clips of something that wouldn't hold still, and that's what FishID is meant to handle.
You can try it for free: every new account gets five identifications on sign-up, plus five more every month.
Every identification is also a way for me to improve it. When users confirm or correct an answer, that feedback helps the next diver who films the same animal.
Where the Housing and the App Meet
This is the part that makes the whole thing click for me, and it's why this story belongs on the DIVEVOLK blog.
Because I shoot on the phone, the footage is already exactly where FishID needs it. No memory card, no laptop, no transfer. I climb back on the boat, open the gallery, and by the end of the surface interval I know the names of the animals I saw on the dive. Then I can post the reel with the right name already in the caption, and the "what is that?" comments get an answer before anyone asks.
A dedicated camera can take great pictures. A phone in a good housing takes great pictures and puts them one tap away from an answer. I'm not the only diver who has turned the phone in the housing into a tool rather than just a camera: a dive instructor even built a digital underwater scoring app for PADI evaluations.
The Gear, Two Years In
A quick word on the housing itself, since that's what makes all of this possible.
Two years, zero problems. In two years of weekly diving, through rinse buckets, boat decks, travel bags and the Egyptian sun, I have not had a single issue with the SeaTouch 4 Max. No leaks, no fogging, no touch controls failing mid-dive. When your phone is the thing inside, that's the review that counts. It was the 4 Max that filmed my rarest encounter so far: a dugong feeding on seagrass off Marsa Alam in August 2025, an animal plenty of Red Sea divers never get to see.
DIVEVOLK recently sent me the new SeaTouch 6 Pro, and a few things stood out right away:
- Swipes work, not just taps, which makes reviewing shots and switching modes underwater much easier.
- It fits newer phones, so a phone upgrade won't mean a housing upgrade. DIVEVOLK has already confirmed SeaTouch 6 Pro fits the iPhone 18 Pro.
- The grip is much better. I often dive without the two-hand handle tray, and the 6 Pro is far more comfortable and secure in one hand, which matters a lot for slow macro work.
- A new front mount takes either a snorkeling red filter or a dome port directly, without a separate clamp.
I've also just received the wide-angle lens from DIVEVOLK's lenses and filters range, and I'm looking forward to trying it on the big moments, the turtles and the dugongs.
Tips: Film It So You Can Identify It
Shooting for identification is a bit different from shooting for likes. What makes the biggest difference, both for FishID and for anyone trying to help you in the comments:
- Show the whole animal. For a nudibranch, the shape and color of the rhinophores (the "horns") and the gills on its back separate one species from another. For a fish, a side-on view of the whole body shows the markings that matter. A dramatic close-up of just the head is often impossible to identify.
- Get close instead of zooming. Water eats contrast. A few centimeters of water between the lens and the subject beats half a meter with zoom every time. (If you want numbers, here is how close a phone in a DIVEVOLK housing can really get.)
- Film a few seconds, even when you want a still. Animals rarely hold still. A short clip gives you many angles to choose from.
- Bring light. Even at 10 meters, red is already fading, and color is often the key to an ID. A small video light brings it back.
- Don't chase and don't touch. A stressed animal shows you its back. Stay still, keep your fins off the reef and let it be. My turtle and dugong clips exist because I hovered and waited.
One Wish for DIVEVOLK
When I film a lot of 4K, my phone battery runs out before the air in my tank does. So my wish for a future housing is a built-in 10,000 mAh power bank that charges the phone during the dive. I'd happily carry the extra weight.
Final Thoughts
I started filming on a phone because the video was better. I kept doing it because the housing never let me down. And somewhere along the way, all those "what is that?" comments turned into a feature I'm genuinely proud of.
If you dive the Red Sea with a DIVEVOLK housing, try it on your next dive: film one animal you don't recognize, then open Red Sea Creatures on the boat and ask FishID. Your first five are on me. You might be surprised how many new names end up in your logbook.
Watch the Footage
All shot on an iPhone 14 Pro Max in a DIVEVOLK SeaTouch housing:
- Green sea turtle, Makadi Bay
- Dugong, Marsa Alam
- Red Sea macro: corals and nudibranchs with the DIVEVOLK +18 macro lens
About the Author
Yevgen Sukharenko is a PADI Divemaster and full-stack web and mobile developer based in Hurghada, Egypt. He dives the Red Sea weekly, films on an iPhone in a DIVEVOLK housing, and is the creator of Red Sea Creatures, a free field guide to about 1,200 Red Sea species, and FishID, its photo and video identification feature, available on the App Store and Google Play.
