Song for Jasmine

Issue 54 of Underwater Photography magazine dropped into my inbox recently. Underwater Photography magazine is a free electronic publication by Peter Rowlands (thanks Pete!). Don’t be fooled by the cost, it’s a highly polished publication, worthy of attention by anyone serious about getting into the water with a camera.

When it comes to taking photographs underwater, there’s lots of good advice out there about technique and equipment. I don’t consider myself to be an expert in underwater photography, but I’ve picked up a few simple tips that I haven’t found mentioned anywhere else, so I’d like to share them with you.

I’ve used two cameras underwater, a Nikon Coolpix 990 in an Ikelite housing with an attached strobe, and a Canon Ixus 400 in Canon’s own WP-DC800 housing.

The Ikelite housing is a work of art, but it’s big, and when you dive with it, you can’t ignore it. The controls are big and chunky, easy to manipulate even if you’re wearing thick gloves – which I wasn’t, since I only used it in the Maldives, where you’re not supposed to dive with gloves. It doesn’t wobble around in your hand, you can get a good grip on it thanks to its large handles.

The Canon housing is much smaller, and has correspondingly smaller controls. It could conceivably fit into the pocket of your BCD, though I wouldn’t recommend that as it can be uncomfortable when you inflate your BCD. I prefer the Canon housing for it’s compactness, though I found the Ikelite easier to use in some ways, precisely because of its size.

So what have I learned about using them? Firstly, one of the most important pieces of kit for underwater photography is your dive-buddy. A buddy who knows what you want to photograph, and helps you find it, is a great asset. It’s all too easy to get engrossed in taking photos and to forget to look out for your buddy as you do so, so it’s important to have your buddy in tune with what you’re doing and how you dive.

Your buddy can help in other ways too. For static subjects, having your buddy illuminate the scene with a diving-lamp is a great help. You shouldn’t rely on flash alone to light your subject for several reasons. For one, it’s not nice to the fish to just set off a flash in front of them, if there’s a constant source of illumination they can at least adapt to it, and the flash is then less of a glare. Using flash to supplement the light, instead of as the main source of light, is kinder to them.

It’s also very hard to frame the photo well in the viewfinder if it’s poorly lit. With your mask and the camera-housing between you and the screen, your view is somewhat restricted. Having the scene well lit by a buddy helps enormously. Of course, many shy creatures won’t stay around for the light, but if anything, the noise of your bubbles will probably scare them more than the light.

If you’re relying on autofocus, again, a well-lit scene is important. But even then, modern cameras can easily get confused underwater. Floating particles in the water can distract the camera, and it may have a hard time identifying the subject. This is especially true if you are trying to photograph something at the back of a hole, or hidden away somewhere in a coral reef. If you know what you are looking for before you dive, you might want to lock the camera focus at an appropriate distance, and simply press the button when you are at the right distance from your subject. That still leaves some guesswork, but at least the camera isn’t hunting for focus, draining the battery all the time.

If you do leave autofocus enabled, you can help the camera by setting it to focus only on the centre of the scene, instead of letting it guess which part of the scene you are interested in. It’ll probably guess wrongly underwater, and you can always crop the finished photograph to re-frame the subject.

Perhaps the best tip I have come across, thanks to Antonio, formerly of Ocean-Pro Dive-Team in Coco Palm resort, is to dive without the camera in the housing!

No, seriously, if you haven’t used the camera housing for a while, since your last diving holiday for example, consider taking the housing down without the camera in it first. That way, if there are any aging defects that will cause leaks, you get to find out about them without ruining your camera. You should test the housing to the maximum depth that you intend to use it, just to be sure. Thanks for the advice, Antonio!

These suggestions may not help you take the greatest photos ever seen, but I find they increase my success-rate for casual shots considerably. I hope you find them useful!

On Monday, my blog will be one year old. It seems to be traditional to celebrate your first ‘blogiversary’ by reflecting on the previous year, asking people what they think of your blog, analysing your statistics, stuff like that. I’m not going to do that, … much.

By far the most popular article on my blog this past year has been Charles Darwins’ first theory of evolution, with Songs about Pollution a distant second. Quite why people are so fascinated with singing about pollution is beyond me, I’m not sure I really want to know, so I’m not going to analyse my stats more than that.

So, I’ve decided to celebrate my blogiversary by asking “What do you see in my blog”, but with a twist. Here are some photos of fish and other creatures that live on coral reefs. Some, like the black-cheeked moray at the top, are always easy to spot. Others manage to hide themselves well, even when you’re looking straight at them. That’s what these photos are about, and I invite you to see if you can identify them. Thanks to Earth, Wind & Water for giving me the idea.

As always, if you click on the photo you will get a larger version, which will definitely help in some cases. I’ll add a comment in a few days identifying everything, in case you can’t make them out.

Looking at these pictures again makes me wonder how many times I’ve looked at a reef and missed something. I’m sure it’s happened a lot, there’s so much life down there that I must surely have missed more stuff than I can imagine. That’s part of the magic of diving, you can dive the same place time and time again and still find new things to enjoy.

These photos were all taken in the Maldives, the only place I’ve dived with a camera. It takes a lot of practise and luck to get good underwater pictures. Some of the subjects are hard to see because the shots capture the way in which it blends in well with its surroundings, others are hard to identify because the photos are not really all that good. Never mind, here goes!

This first one is easy enough. It takes some practise to be able to spot them when you first start diving, but when you get the measure of them it’s often easy to find them – some of them, at least. In the Maldives, if not elsewhere, they can get quite large, 12-18 inches (30-45 cm), and often hide right on top of the reef at 15-30 feet (5-10 metres) depth, where the light is good.

This one is rather harder. I dived several times at this location, in Ari Atoll, but never once found this fish for myself. Even when you know where to look for them they’re hard to find. Like many smaller fish, they have a habit of turning themselves to present a narrow profile to larger creatures (such as me) to better avoid being spotted.

This one is even harder to identify. If you don’t know this fish exists, you probably won’t see it. Like the fish in the photograph above, it insisted on turning itself narrow-side on to me, making it harder to get a good picture of it. I wonder how many of these I’ve overlooked, this is the only one I’ve ever seen.

This one is the hardest of the lot. Even I have trouble making it out. I can see a fin easily enough, but to figure out exactly where the head is, the body, and the tail, that takes some scrutiny. If I recall correctly, I only saw this one because it moved.

This one is fairly easy. This is the only one of these I’ve ever seen, and it was big, about the size of a watermelon. I like diving close to the reef, moving slowly along it looking for small things hidden away. Finding myself almost eyeball-to-eyeball with this guy came as quite a surprise. Incidentally, this is one good reason not to touch the reef while diving. These things are poisonous to the touch, and well camouflaged.

Lastly, this is one of my favourite photos, though not one of my best. I wanted to get a picture of the banded boxer shrimp, but the camera chose to focus on something else instead, and I’m glad it did. So the question is, how many shrimps can you see in this photo? I’ll give you a hint, there are more than two.