Underwater photography refers to photographing anything and everything underwater. The subjects of this type of photography includes both marine creatures, animals, ships sunk remains for many years ago, and all other things buried under the water. Underwater photography is a new world to capture, an interesting and fun experience, fascinating creatures in unusual locations. The unique thing about underwater photography is that water is never the same way twice. Every time it is different. If you are already a diver and like to be underwater, then taking a camera with you on a dive to take pictures is the next step in exploring the underwater world. There are two main types of underwater photography: Macro and wide-angle photography. Macro photography focuses on small things like seahorses, scorpion fish, and frog fish,but wide-angle photography focuses on larger things in the marine life like sharks, whales and manta rays.
Of course, not every one can do underwater photography, it’s a kind of photography that needs specialized training and special equipments.
Underwater photography differs from other types of photography and, you face many challenges.
Table of Contents
Basic Underwater Photography Tips:
1- Think first about your safety
The first and the most important thing is safety. Swim in safe areas. It’s so important to keep yourself safe. Having the right things to protect yourself and your camera is necessary. Always, keep strengthening your swimming skills. It’s important to realize your strengths and weaknesses, this helps you not to find yourself in dangerous situation.
2- Wide-angle
The flash position is so important, make sure that the flash lightens the spaces you want to photograph. To Photograph with wide-angle, you get closer to the subject you want to take a photo of. Obviously, the closer you get to the subject, the better color, sharpness and contrast will be, and you’ll get more colorful photographs.
3- Type of flash
While photographing underwater, don’t use flash on camera because it will add light to the tiny floating things inside the water that are between the lens of the camera and the subject.
4- Type of lenses for Underwater Photography
Choose the lens according to the shot you want to get. Some types of lenses don’t work underwater, whereas other’s work much better. For underwater photography, you normally need three general focal length ranges of lenses: Ultra-wide, mid-range zoom, and macro.
5- Shoot in Raw mode
Shooting in RAW mode, allows you great flexibility in post/production in Lightroom or Photoshop. In addition, if you want to print the photos, RAW will provide you the best chance of printing a high- quality photos.
6- Colors
In underwater photography, color is a thing that differs than many other types of photography. Water absorbs light quickly. This thing affects on the light level. Some colors like red are absorbed faster than other colors. So, when you deeper in the water, red color will not be visible to the camera anymore. Orange colors as well give greenish tan. To solve this problem, you can add artificial light yourself. As you go deeper in the water, using strobes becomes necessary. Many professionals use more than one strobe, because using only one strobe doesn’t create natural shadows. Use red filter for your underwater photography, because this helps to correct images from being green or blur.
7- Choose the Suitable Camera for Underwater Photography
There are many camera types for underwater photography. waterproof camera or waterproof camera housing to keep it dry, and underwater flash. There are different models of housing camera from the plastic to the aluminum with different prices. It doesn’t make difference which camera and housing combination you buy, the important thing is to know how these tools work and how to use the setting. This means, you will not be able to use the manual mode of the camera when photographing. Soft underwater housing is more portable and cheaper than hard underwater housing.
8- Work With an Expert Crew for Underwater Photography
It’s important to choose an expert crew to work with during photographing. Experience crew help you to have successful trip.
9- Avoid Backscatter
Some unwanted issues come with strobes like backscatter. You have to reduce these backscatters to produce clean photos these backscatters occurs when dirt or parts brightened by the strobe and look clear in the resulting photos. This happens when you use a compact with turned on flash. Adjust the strobe, then put it at an angle outside the lens.
In this way, your subject will be lit and at the same time any brightened particles won’t have reflection in the lens’ way and won’t be seen in the final photo. If you want to use a compact with flash fixed on it, try to get closer to the subject to decrease backscatter. In some cases, you may need to use more than one strobe. This will provide more lighting and less backscatter.
10- Digital Photography
Digital photography gives you the ability to check your exposure on the camera’s LCD, this is so useful because exposures differs underwater than on land. If your camera has an exposure bracketing feature, you can enable it, so you don’t have to concern about changing exposures while shooting.