Tips & Technique Guide

Great Pictures Made Easy

I. Tips for Great Pictures

3. The Great Hunt

While you hunt for a big strange fish or a good shot of your buddy with a stingray, always include the underwater magic in your pictures.

Get a mystic blue background, an interesting little red fish and yellow coral in the foreground. These color contrasts will add depth to your pictures.

Capture rising air bubbles against the reflections of the surface water. This will indicate motion.

Use the walls of a canyon as a frame for your object, look for contrasting colors, bizarre shapes, towering kelp forests, subtle shades of water colors, sand and rock, wild structures, or dark shades of a wreck penetrated by spears of sun rays.

The primary target for most people is, of course, a good picture of yourself and your friends surrounded by tropical fish. This is actually the easiest part.

A diver should be only 5ft. to 6 ft. away for a good picture. That excludes big group shots. Portrait shots of diver and fish are best taken at 2ft. to 4 ft. with the snap-on MACRO 3X close up lens. Use MACRO 8X lens for extreme close-up of 14” to 16”.

You may chum for fish with bits of food, but pick something that does not fall apart and cloud up the water (for example, bread dissolves and clouds up the water). Check with a local dive master to select chum that does not endanger the fish.

Be very calm and patient, and let that curious fish get closer and closer. Get up-current from a good spot and just drift. motionless along with your camera in ready position. To stay in a camera-ready waiting position, approach your subject facing the current.

Always take notes of your pictures and mark your films.

It is very exciting to document every fish in your area in an album.

Once you have some expertise you might start to take slides and put a presentation together, possibly combined with music and video for dive clubs, schools and friends. Scanning your pictures into your PC and printing impressive color presentations can be fun and valuable for education or business.

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