Underwater Photography -Techniques

[Shadowkiller]

These are the techniques I use for my photos. I'm a good amateur at best, so feel free to argue!

First up, some general points.

1. Dont just point and click! This rarely works. Good photos need planning.

2. Test out your camera on land and get to know its functions. Theres no point in drifiting along trying to work out how to change the exposure setting whilst a pod of dolphins swims by.

3. Good spearos make ok photographers. Bad spearos need not apply. To shoot a fish you need to get within 2-3m, to get a good photo you need to get within 30-100cm. So work out what fish you want to take pics of, and do your research on how to get close! There are fish species I have hunted for over a year before getting a decent shot.

4. Get close to your subject, the water column absorbs light fast. So get close. Then get a bit closer.

5. Dont care about the background? Wrong! A good clean background makes a good photo. A brown fish on brown weed, with brown sand in the background will confuse people. High exposure settings ie slow shutter speed will intensify blue backgrounds.

6. Shutter speed: The faster the better, usually (see point 5), especially when shooting fish that are very active.

7. Aperture: The higher the more depth you get to your pic. This is important for macro shots especially.

8. Lighting. Tricky stuff getting light to your subject, especially 20m down. In shallow water ambient light is good, but care needs to be taken to keep the sun behind you, unless you are looking for a special effect with the sun bursting from behind the subject.

Below 5m red light is gone, so a flash is required. Most cameras have an internal flash, some housings will have diffusers for them. If you have an onboard flash then backscatter, that is reflected light from particles in the water, will be a problem. Unless you have 30m viz! The onboard flash can be manipulated by shielding it with a finger to get less light. But for serious photography a strobe is needed which is positioned so that its light will not reflect back into the camera lens from particles.

9. Read photography mags and search the web for good websites dealing with UW photography. Theres no need to reinvent the wheel! Learn from others.

Below is one of my first pics ever.

 

[Shadowkiller]

Some finer points.

1. When shooting fish on sand, the light from your flash will reflect more, so you can use a faster shutter speed, or higher aperture. So I might use 1/160 and F5.6, say.

2. Shooting fish in caves means almost zero natural light, so my flash has to do all the work. Settings in this situation might be 1/80 and F3.2 for a very dark cave.

3. If your flash is on the right hand side of the lens, try to shoot fish so that the fish angles away from you, with it being closest on the left. That way all parts of the fish will get the same amount of light.

4. When diving in silty or sandy conditions, approach the fish from down current, or, if there is swell, from side-on (with respect to the swell), so that any particles you stir up are carried away from you and the fish. Otherwise you have to hold your breath for a loooong time!

5. The Sun goes behind you. Always. Unless you want special effects. Which is HARD! This goes double for taking photos of mates with fish, always make them face the sun.

6. Spooky fish don't like camera housings. Point a camera at a snapper and its goooone! So use the same techniques as you do for spearing. Hide the camera lens opening from the fish till the last second. Or let the fish swim in front of the lens itself.

Below is one of my most recent pics.

 

[Shadowkiller]

Editing... the bit I hate.

When I got back from Vanuatu I had over 900 photos to go through. One by #$%^* one...

My editing technique:

1. Check the pic, is it of a fish tail, random geography where a fish used to be a second before or just rubbish? Delete.

2. Check for brightness and focus. A very dark pic is hard to save, as is a really blurry one. Delete.

3. By now youre down to roughly 20-40% of your original pics. Have multiple photos of the same fish? Don't just keep one! For identification of the species, a shot of the tail fin may be more useful than a head-on shot.

4. Open the file in a photo editor like Adobe Photoshop. Crop according to taste. The positioning of the fish, ie the composition is a matter of personal taste, so experiment!

5. Eliminate major backscatter using the heal or rubberstamp tool. This makes the pic look less like a snowstorm photo, and more like it was 30m viz.

6. Colour correction. This can be done poorly, using only the "auto-correction". If the pic has a lot of blue/green background, it can look horrendous. For the lazy, its the easiest option. Once you know what you want, manually adjusting the levels is best. There are usually 3 channels, red, green and blue; which can be manipulated to add/subtract each colour from the pic.

7. Sharpening: I use the "Unsharp mask" to sharpen photos to better define eyes and scales. Again, you get better with practice. Oversharpening looks rubbish, so its not hard to work out when to stop.

8. Save the file as large as possible, then save a smaller version for internet use. Dont post 1meg files! Dial-up users will hate you.

The below pic is an example of selective editing. Whilst the composition of the original was just ok, with sloping pylons and a school of fish in the background, it was dark, and due to the filthy water, had lots of backscatter. The subject, a Clown toby, was also too small, and was swamped by the rest of the pic. It didnt draw the viewers eye to it as much as it should.

So I decided to crop it tightly, and make a "Fish ID photo" type of photo out if it.

The following steps were taken:
1. Cropping, with the centre point of the pic being the centre of the fish.
This removed the pylons, and other background, leaving the fish as the only item of interest in the pic.
2. Colour correction using the "Auto Levels" function in Photoshop.
I checked the natural colours of the fish in books and on the Fishbase database to make sure I got it right.
3. Brightness enhancement.
The pic looked better brighter. No other reason.

 

[Huan]

Nice tips Sascha.
I might utilise them if I ever get back in the water!
Do you shoot with manual control all the time? I usually just let the camera decide what it wants to do, I find it hard enough without adjusting F stops and apertures.

 

[SanderP]

Nice tips indeed. Please post your best shots here, if possible. And what camera are you using? Are there any particular cheap(er) cameras that can make decent pics?

 

[MKDVR]

Below 5m red light is gone, so a flash is required. Most cameras have an internal flash, some housings will have diffusers for them. If you have an onboard flash then backscatter, that is reflected light from particles in the water, will be a problem. Unless you have 30m viz! The onboard flash can be manipulated by shielding it with a finger to get less light. But for serious photography a strobe is needed which is positioned so that its light will not reflect back into the camera lens from particles.

What I took from this is that the cause of backscatter is the location of the flash. Correct? Thanks for the tips.

 

[Shadowkiller]

Huan: After a few hundred shots, I know better than the camera!
Different fish need different exposure speeds, say a placid fish can be shot at 1/80, but a fast moving wrasse need 1/200 in order to get a decent pic. Same with the aperture, I decide what depth of field I want. These days I set the exposure and aperture without really thinking, all it takes is a quick glance around to gauge the amount of natural light available, and what "prey" I'm after.

Miyagi: I use a Olympus 5050z. I am out of the loop on current cameras, but the old adage of "buy the best you can afford", always holds. Canon, Sony and Olympus all make good point-and-shoot cameras with polycarbonate housings. You should be able to get a decent setup for 1k-2k US.

MKDVR: Yes, the more central the flash position, the more likely that light from the flash will be directed back into the lens. Shift the flash to one side and you get a rapid reduction in backscatter as the reflected light probability follows a Sine curve. Kinda hard to explain without a pic.

I'm off to see my family for easter, back in a week. I'll post a few more pic then.

 

[SEDATE]

Thnx Sascha
Really very good info

 

[land shark]

Thnx Sascha
Really very good info

__________________


what he said

 

[Hypersquid1]

do above water photo techniques also apply to underwater?

 

[iggy_92]

do above techniques apply to digital cameras or are they different?
thanks

 

[Rockbrother]

Most of the smaller digital cameras with housings does not take an external flash that connects to the camera (through the lens metering). In this case you have to use manual settings because the camera does not "know" that you are using a flash and you pic will be over exposed. I use a Canon A80 with ikelite flash that sync with the camera's on board flash. This setup will work with most cameras with housings and manual settings. The only problem is that the flash setup was more expensive than the camera and housing together.

 

[Shadowkiller]

The main above/under technique I always try to follow is: Keep the sun behind you!

When taking wider angle pics, where the flash has less of an effect, the available light plays an important role.

See pic below

 

[Shadowkiller]

When photgraphing in less than perfect viz, shallow water is a good option as the available light will of course be a lot better than deeper down. The pic of the Blenny was taken in atrocious viz (2m). By switching off the flash, I had to rely on positioning myself correctly, and waiting for the fish to sit up straight, so to speak, for the pic.

Wider angle pics, taking in entire schools of fish can look really good, especially if they fill the entire frame. The pic of the tropical snappers was taken up in QLD, where the viz was 25m. It would have been better if I was down lower, but the fish were skittish, so I had to hide behind a coral bommie!

The closeup of the Old Wife (black and white fish), was a nice shot to get as it really shows the delicate fin rays, as well as jaws and teeth of this species. Great for showing to other amateur ichtyologists.

 

[dwwestesq]

Great tips. Thanks!

Looking at Pentax Optio WP or the Olympus Stylus 720 SW and their respective underwater housings. Would be purchasing a second memory? card (largest and fastest) and battery (largest).

Other candidates must be waterproof cameras plus available manufacturer (cheaper) waterproof housings for diving.

Thoughts? Thanks!