Underwater photography
- scuba photography
- dive photography
A wide lens thirty centimetres away and two strobes putting the red back.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Water absorbs light by colour, and it starts with red. Red is gone by about five metres, orange by ten, yellow by twenty. A picture taken on ambient light alone at fifteen metres is blue green, whatever the subject actually looked like.
Water also scatters. Every centimetre between the port and the subject drops contrast and adds a grey veil, so the rule of the genre is the opposite of every land genre: get closer. A wide lens thirty centimetres away shows a whole shark with less water in front of it than a normal lens two metres away.
How it works
Name the housing and the port. A 16mm fisheye behind a dome for a big subject, a flat port with a close-up lens for a small one.
Give the working distance in centimetres, not metres. Thirty centimetres is normal, and a metre is already far.
Say two strobes, angled outward and held wide of the housing. Say they restore the red the water absorbed. Angling them outward keeps the beams off the particles directly in front of the lens, and those particles still show at the edges of the beams.
When to use it
Use it for a reef, a wreck, a shoal, a shark, a kelp forest, a swimmer seen from below, a split frame at the surface.
Leave it alone when you want a clean studio look. Suspended particles, a blue cast and a soft far field are part of the genre and cannot be removed without losing it.
Told apart from its neighbours
Cinema publishes Underwater as an atmosphere. That entry is the look of a shot which happens under water: caustics on a wall, suspended particles, a blue cast. This entry is the craft behind it. The housing, the two strobes, the red the water absorbs, and a working distance of thirty centimetres.
Macro photography under water uses the same housing with a flat port and a close-up lens. The rule does not change: less water between the port and the subject means more colour and more contrast.
Wildlife photography on land can stand fifty metres back and still get the frame. Under water fifty centimetres is already a long way, because water scatters and absorbs light far harder than air does.
Where it is used
Nikon sold the Nikonos from 1963, a camera which went into the water with no housing at all, and dive photography grew around it. The arrangement it settled on has not changed since: a wide lens close in, and two strobes held wide on arms so the beams cross behind the particles. Reef survey work and dive magazines still publish the depth, the port and the strobe positions beside the picture.
- dive magazines
- reef survey plates
- blue water shark frames
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own subject, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
<subject>, underwater photography, 16mm fisheye in a housing thirty centimetres from the subject, two strobes angled outward restoring the red the water absorbed, suspended particles lit in the beams, a blue green water column behind, camera angled slightly upward toward the surface light
What goes wrong
The picture comes back with clean air clarity and a sharp far background. Say suspended particles in the strobe beams, and say the water column behind falls soft and blue green.
Everything is blue, including the subject. Say two strobes restore the red at close range, and say the blue green cast stays only in the water behind.
Leave out
a long lens, a distant subject, clear air clarity, a matched daylight white balance
Watch for
Water removes red in the first five metres. Past a metre of water everything turns blue green, and no colour correction puts the red back.
Questions
Shoot it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
Next to it in hard to reach
