Underwater Photography Tips
The vibrant colors and the diverse marine life make underwater photography one of the most exhilarating and memorable photographing experiences. Underwater photography explains the entire story of ecstasy as well as adventure of every dive. All-in-all underwater photography is fun yet challenging and here are a few tips for effective underwater photography.
Get close and shoot up:
Firstly, develop your skill, respect your subject, and your performance should be best to hold your position in water as underwater photography is more difficult than landscape photography. Try to spend more time with underwater creatures so that you can understand their behavior. Move slowly in water and if an animal is moving never chase it. Spot out in the distance where you hope the animal will go and wait for the perfect moment and then shoot. You should set up your lights where you want to shoot to maintain good lighting conditions. An external flash is very useful for underwater photography but it will not give what you exactly require. Be close enough to your picture so that the flash is lighting up nicely which will give your images a perfect color and will light up the subject against the background. Also, consider to shoot the creatures from an appropriate angle as they have eyes on the sides of their head too.
Camera and Lens
To capture a perfect shot you need a close up lens. Most digital cameras have good close up capability. It may be difficult to get pictures of small creatures because some cameras are not equipped for close-up photography. Additional lenses can make huge difference to your underwater photography especially wet lenses which are more attractive. Hence, depending on the subject one has to change lenses such as wide angle, zoom lenses, telephoto lenses etc. One should prefer zoom lens which helps in capturing good portraits whereas wide angle lenses offer the greatest depth. While shooting at night one should use macro lenses. Thus, lens can capture the photo equal to the size of sensor of camera.
Aperture settings for photography
Aperture is the size of the lenses and the function of the aperture is to adjust the quantity of light. Size of aperture is known as F-stop which is always in indirect proportion. It determines brightness of the image, field of the image, and controls the amount of light.
Thumb Rule
While shooting underwater it is advised to keep the sharpest focus around one third of planned composition. It is also called as hyper focal distance.
Just remember to get close to your subject, use an external strobe to kill backscatter, shoot up and surely you will be able to take great shots within a time.
