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Learning Underwater Photography Can Be a Rewarding Experience!
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Underwater Photography Considerations
Visibility is the most important consideration in Underwater
photography. The natural elements of air, water and minerals are
responsible for causing certain affects to the water, which divers quickly
become aware of once they descend below the surface. Weather can vastly
cause the visibility to be great, good, bad, or horrible. Rainfall causes
fresh water run off from the surrounding shores and minerals are deposited
into the water as sediment. Strong winds stir up the water and sand, and
cause shallow dive areas to have very low visibility from the suspended
sediment. Therefore, always take your camera with you, but if the weather
has been bad, stick to macro photography.
Turbidity can also cause problems for photography Underwater
while trying to capture a reef scene. This can be from movement of water or
from a high amount of dissolved minerals, or high plankton suspended in the
water. This results in light waves having to bend around the matter and
distorts the object receiving the necessary light for colors to show.
Magnification results from light refraction caused when the
light's energy waves are bent as they pass from air into water. This can be
more easily understood by simply seeing what happens when a pencil is placed
in a clear drinking glass that is half filled with water.
As sunlight enters our atmosphere the light is bent through
the prism resulting in a blue sky. Then as these energy waves enter water,
which is denser than air, the sunlight gets refracted again. Once reflected
off a subject it then passes the glass of a mask, or camera lens, and is
bent again. All of this light bending results in a 25% magnification of the
objects being viewed. In other words, objects will look larger and appear
closer than they actually are. Objects that are four feet away will appear
to be three feet away.
Another effect of refraction is that color from the energy
waves start to be consumed by water molecules, plankton, and algae as the
depth of the water increase. Red is not seen after 15 feet. Then yellow is
lost at around 45 feet, and at 60 feet, the only remaining colors seen are
blue, gray and black.
This is why smart divers use Underwater flashlights or a camera strobe to
restore the light rays that have been lost. With
light to replace the lost sunlight the diver can observe all the colors.
Only the objects within 3-4 feet of the light will have color. Learning the balance of flash and ambient
sunlight takes practice, practice, practice. (Discussions on the blending of
light sources are under the strobes article.)
Parallaxing is how a diver sees a subject on one plane
of perspective and the camera lens will see the image on a different plane
of view. Practicing to keep the subject matter three feet away from
the lens while keeping the view finder close to the eye, will allow the image to
be seen the same. If images are not in the same quadrant as you
visualized, then the subject (for example a diver's arm or leg), will be cut off in the photo. This
is when you know that parallaxing has occurred.
Remember Underwater photography starts as skill development, then progresses to composition, followed by technique and
finally artistic expression.
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Photo of Monte at Pirates Week Festivale 2008
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Web site first created 14 March, 1996
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