Get Color to Dive For!
Cathy Church literally wrote the book(s) on underwater photography. Enjoy her techniques here and join her around the globe. Marty Snyderman’s articles have graced dive magazines for decades. Learn here and join him in the Philippines.
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This is so cool...
Pardon me for the dated use of “cool.” I don’t have a better way to express what I feel.
I live in upstate New York, USA. No, not skyscrapers and concrete...this is primarily farm country. Think apples and dairy cows. And I actually enjoy living on what many people would consider the frozen tundra. As my...
Though certainly not the norm, occasionally some photos can come out grainy.
When an image is very dark, or very low contrast, the potential for graininess rises. In particular, when your camera is forced to boost the low light level that it captures, the image may become grainy. You may not realize this is happening because cameras generally make this boost automatically. And some cameras do this...
So just what is lightness and contrast?
In an image, lightness (or brightness) is the overall light level. The picture of an eel in a coral crevasse at 30 feet is a good example of an image without much lightness, unless you illuminate it with a strobe. A dolphin just under the surface can be an example of an image with high lightness.
While there are many techniques for sharpening, some yield better results than others. We have selected one with a counterintuitive name...Unsharp Masking. Why? Because it tends to accentuate the important parts to the image without increasing visual noise or graininess.
It is always fun to add any new twist that you can think of for your underwater photography. I decided to experiment with things that were orange. I selected out lots of photos that I already had, and I also went on a few dives looking for anything with orange. I was very lucky and found my absolute favorite but elusive subject, the gaudy clown crab (Platypodiella spectabilis).
Don’t just use your strobes to light up everything. Sometimes you need to be careful how to use your strobes to NOT light parts of the image so that you can make shadows.
I loved this sponge with the look of a cookie monster. But if I had used me strobe(s) closer to the lens for front lighting, it would have lit up the sponge inside the “mouth” and “eyes.” I wanted...
Have you ever wondered how people find these huge red finger sponges on the same dive where you saw only little ones? The answer is that these ARE the little ones you saw but photographed very close with an extremely wide-angle lens that includes everything within a 180º diagonal area. That means that you can stand very close to your 8 foot wall at home and get the entire wall from floor to ceiling in...
Have you noticed that your underwater images aren’t always as sharp as what you are used to seeing topside? That’s probably because the water scatters the light bouncing off your subject.
If you don’t want to loose any sharpness due to light scattering, you’ll need to capture your photos in...
As Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message."
While I'm not so sure he was talking about underwater photography, the principle is similar. The medium in which a signal travels influences the information received. This not only happens underwater, but topside is well. The sky tends to be blue (where you dive...not here in Rochester, NY, where gray is the dominant color) because of the differing interaction between atmospheric molecules and wavelengths of light....
