Blackwater Diving can be challenging. Not only are you drifting a long in the dark looking for exciting things, but many of us like to bring our cameras to be able to capture the weirdness of the critters you can see on Blackwater Dives. Now if you don’t know what Read more…
When you first start diving, the most difficult but important thing is to maintain proper buoyancy. This is even more crucial when you dive with a (big) camera! Neither do you want to damage corals or any marine life, nor your expensive toys. Also, you want to save your wrist from heavy lifting underwater and dragging “dead weight” around which affects your air consumption. Luckily, float arms were invented to support you and your camera rig. In this blog, we want to give you a quick guide on which buoyancy arms to choose for your SLR or mirrorless setup.
One of the most common questions I get asked when it comes to underwater macro photography is how to achieve black backgrounds. The popping colors of the subject on black creates great contrasts in an image.
Generally speaking, a black or dark background is achieved by a small aperture. You would want to let as little light as possible through your camera lens. However, it’s not just that easy since a big F-stop/ small aperture automatically means greater depth of field!
Every underwater photographer has his „thing“ and a certain way they get comfortable with shooting subjects. For most photographers and when it comes to macro, it’s the black background. For me, it’s Bokeh and shooting with an open aperture. I never get bored of this technique and the creamy background but in order to add a bit more color to my pictures, I thought I’d try another more creative approach.
Today I headed out for 2 dives in the morning, armed with the Nauticam D500, 105mm lens, double flip holder and the SMC1 and SMC2.
I didn’t want to take too many diopters as it would have meant juggling them around underwater, and frankly they are too expensive to risk scratching.
These days it is pretty hard to choose from all the diopters available – you probably have at least one old school one in your kit bag. The Inon UCL 165 and 330 were the first mass produced diopters specifically for underwater use, before those we had to use slide on single element diopters (woodys diopter), or put a higher quality dual element diopter directly on your lens before you got in the water (Nikon 6T).
When you’re new to (manual) photography, you have a lot to juggle at the same time: starting with the positioning and settings of your camera, not to mention your one or two strobes!
Luckily, new underwater photography gadgets enter the market on a regular basis and the idea of using a ring light instead of a strobe or torch isn’t that new as such. However, the newly released Kraken Weefine Ring Light got us excited since it’s especially designed for macro photography. Let’s see what the results look like and how we rate the 1000 lumens strong, relatively inexpensive light.
In most of the cases you would probably hit the delete button straight away, when you check your pictures and see a blurry image. The main objective of photography is usually to have a clear and crisp subject in focus. However, when used right, a bit of a blur can be quite interesting and give your image a sense of motion.
A lot of divers in Lembeh Strait take their photography serious. Which also means that they want to try different things. So a lot of them ask me: “We would like to try some wide angle in Lembeh … where you have a nice coral reef?”. Then the obvious answer would Read more…
One of the most interesting things about our annual photo workshops is the new and interesting people that we meet each year. For this years Underwater Tribe/NAD Lembeh Photo Fun Week, we have all new guests except for one guest who is now joining us for his third workshop with Read more…