There’s something undeniably magical that you experience in the underwater world, the silence and suspension, amazing light that dances through kelp forests or coral reefs, and the life forms that seem almost alien. Like many, your first glimpse of majestic coral reefs or curious fish, octopuses, turtles or even sharks sparked a desire to capture and share that moment with others, to allow them to see this realm as you see it. To do this, divers often dive with a camera, be it a small waterproof action camera, a compact waterproof camera, a compact in housing camera or a larger rig DSLR in a bulky underwater housing. For many, underwater photography isn’t just about taking pictures under the sea, it’s about “seaing” differently, moving slowly and patiently, and diving mindfully. It’s a weave of technical skill, dive competence, ethical awareness, and creative storytelling. So, what does it entail - let’s take a plunge….

However, before you dive into the depths with a newfound camera toy, it’s worth understanding the different camera gear and what’s really required from a proficient and responsible underwater photographer.

Underwater photography demands equipment that can withstand knocks and pressure, water and moisture, and the challenges of low and depth-modified light. You certainly don’t need a top-tier, mortgage-busting digital single-lens-reflex housing combination to start. When I purchased my current second-hand and slightly affordable rig, my wife commented that she thought we were buying a housing not a house! Years back, I started out with a then state of the art Nikonos IV – that frustratingly limited me (I didn’t know any better!) to one spool of 36 images per dive. Now compact cameras such as the Olympus TG series offer solid image quality and control – for some years I photographed with a TG6 in an acrylic housing and wide dome port from Backscatter – a very affordable and adequate system producing images that I still sell today. I currently generally now use a Canon 5D Mkiii or a 7D Mkii DSLRs, with a 10-17mm fisheye lens in a minidome port on bulky Nauticam housings armed with two Inon Z330 strobes (that restore the colour lost at depth) on buoyancy arms that provide both rig stabilization and neutral buoyancy. It’s a rig that has taken me a while to learn to dive with, in terms of buoyancy control, body positioning (mine not the camera's!) and over the top shooting without a viewfinder. It’s a system that has taught me a huge amount (through trial and error) about manual photography and reading conditions, light and contrast, that a green low viz kelp bed dive needs different white balance to blue tropical coral conditions, or that distance to your subject is your arch-enemy. That said, a compact camera in a dedicated housing and a single strobe provides a great starting point to learn the ropes without overwhelming your dive equipment, dive experiences or the depth of your wallet. 

At the outset, no image is worth compromising dive safety (no matter how tempting....!), so that before you add that camera rig to the rest of your underwater paraphernalia, you should be a confident and competent diver, who has excellent buoyancy, situational awareness, and air management control. It’s that good diving practice that makes good underwater photography both practical and possible. Diving photographers are often totally preoccupied with little situational awareness of where they are or where their buddy is. I once misplaced a dive buddy in a low viz green water dive, to have him surface over 30 minutes later, so preoccupied with his photos that he was unaware that we were no longer in contact. If a situation arises, you may need to dump that expensive rig (to retrieve it later maybe….?), your priorities still need to lie with your dive-buddy, dive safety and the situation awareness of good diving practice 

Remember too that looking after a pricey camera rig changes your priorities, your buoyancy and your dexterity - usually you give up one hand for the camera rig. Are you now confident in diving with one hand – think deploying a surface marker buoy with one hand or alternatively doing so with a bulky camera rig clipped into your BCD. What a tangled web we could weave....

Probably most importantly, however, can you maintain your position on a reef without touch or sinking into that fragile bed of feather-stars or coral? Careless positioning, buoyancy control or finning behaviour can cause immense harm without diving photographers being aware of the damage they can cause. No touch positioning is crucial. Can you buoyancy hover through breath control, can you fin backwards away from a reef without kicking up sand or silt (that will anyway ruin images through backscatter – more later) Certain dive destinations have now limited the use of cameras by novice divers on coral reefs to limit reef damage that now potentially compounds the damage of ocean heatwave induced coral bleaching.

A final essential practice is that of approaching subjects gently and ethically to photograph non-invasively - always letting a subject control the nature of the interaction. Baiting, moving or rearranging subjects are a huge no-no! and are likely to get you banished from a dive site with good reason. 

So now you are ready to dive in – a competent and ethical diver wanting to make your imagery count. My guess (and here I don’t wish to rain on anyone’s parade, and this is based on my own long-learnt experience) is that you are going to be woefully disappointed with your initial dive photography results. There are a number of challenges of underwater photography that are going to trip you up.

Firstly, water absorbs light and filters colours at various wavelength bandwidths. Reds vanish first, followed by oranges and yellows. Importantly this is not only vertically but also horizontally – the further you are from a subject the greater this is. Your initial photographs are therefore dull and colourless and a monochromatic green …. So, you trundle back the store, wallet or wheelbarrow in hand to add lighting options to your rig to bring back the colours and the vibrancy lost at depth. Supplementary lighting as lights or strobes, then raises one of the major obstacles to underwater photography – that of backscatter.

Backscatter, the reflection of your artificial lighting by hundreds of suspended particles in the water column are the ruin of many a great underwater image. Huge amounts have been written about lighting and strobe positioning to limit backscatter. As with the light conundrum discussed above, the closer you are to a subject the less particles lie between your lens and subject. Get close and then closer again. How then do you fit subjects in your frame? Go close and go wide – use the widest-angle lenses you can – those lenses like fisheyes with minimal focus distances. Many of my images are taken at centimetres. Don’t be phased about the curvature – there are few straight-line references underwater.

Photographers talk about the rule of thirds. Scrap this and use an underwater photographer’s rule of thirds. Your subject should be no further from your lens than one third of the visibility.

Then there is the issue of photographing downwards. In simple terms – Don’t! The results are just sooo disappointing. Try to photograph at the level of your subject or even upwards against the light. This is why the positioning and buoyancy control is so critical. In this regard I almost never use a viewfinder – I could never get my eyes low enough for the angle I want to photograph. Many of my images are taken with the camera pointing upwards to the surface and there is little reference of this in the final image.

So now you starting to get the idea – but what about all of these control buttons on your camera (and strobes). There are a couple that are critical to the weird low light environments of underwater photographers, particularly when shooting in manual mode to have exposure control.

1.      White balance settings need to be experimented with to gain an understanding of how water colour changes image colour, and the compensations that can be made.

2.      ISO needs to be as low as you can go to limit grain but will need to be traded off against motion blur and depth of field requirements.

3.      Aperture or f stop needs to be small (high f stop number) to increase the depth of field (the length of focal distance).

4.      Shutter speeds need to be fast enough to avoid camera shake or the blur of moving subjects.

These settings and how you use them are critical to control the light availability, the amount of light reaching the film or image sensor and the noise grain of the resultant image - all particularly important in low light diving photography at any depth over 5 metres. Light availability can be controlled by artificial light in forms of strobes or lights, the light reaching the image sensor is controlled by the shutter speed and the aperture and the sensitivity of the sensor is controlled through the ISO setting. For any given light, high shutter speeds to limit motion blur means trading off depth of field of a wider aperture. A greater depth of field (in a wide-angle scenic shot) means possibly more blur of a lower shutter speed. Both can be traded off against noise grain in the image by increasing sensor sensitivity. Ok so this is probably now about as clear as a low vis muck dive. Simply it’s about balance and trading off individual picture needs. For a fast dolphin you are going to have to trade off grain or depth of field, for a high depth of field scenic shot you are going to have to be a still as possible (why landlubber photographers often use tripods).

I shoot many of my images as wide close up where a particular subject is front and central against a wide background. Important in this is the control of the background exposure by camera controls (through shutter speed, and aperture) and control of the foreground exposure by the strobe settings lighting of the foreground. This is really similar to the process of fill in flash.

Post-processing and editing is part of the underwater photography process. Software can be used to correct colour, remove backscatter (those pesky particle dots can now be edited with automated software), increase or decrease contrast and give your image a little more punch. That said an edited image is easily recognizable as such, so treat editing lightly.

Underwater photography offers many different paths from macro shots of nudibranchs, wide-angle reef-scapes, behavioural documentation, or conservation storytelling. It provides me with hours of mindful, patient diving purpose. I see things I wouldn’t have seen without a camera. Mostly I have clear ideas of images that I want in my head – my imagined, and translating my imagined and experienced to my images is something I find incredibly satisfying.

Most of all, you are not alone in this journey – use social media and the web to allow others’ work to inspire to your own. With time your underwater photography will become more than a hobby to be a way of “seaing” that will teach you ocean patience, humility, and immense respect.

Start small, learn deeply, shoot ethically with purpose, explore and enjoy. You’ll never look back….