Underwater Surf Photography

Raw Transcript

one of my favorite types of surf photography is underwater surf photography and it’s also one of the more popular topics which people like yourself wanted me to discuss so I’m going to do my best I’m not the the best underwater photography it’s something I’m learning myself it’s definitely one of the things that I find challenging and I really want to improve so hopefully that means it’s a good subject to talk to you about in this course one of the reasons why it’s quite hard for me at least is it’s bit of an excuse really but I live in the UK the waters quite cold and often the water when there is good waves the water is pretty murky around where I live having said that I haven’t got had the opportunity to shoot underwater quite a lot where I am and I’ve traveled to places like Samoa for instance where the water is crystal clear a lot of the time and and Indonesia and other places where underwater photography is a lot more straightforward or a lot more accessible let’s say so let me give you a few of the tips that I’ve picked up and and a few things that I’m going to be working on so first firstly you’re gonna need a water housing obviously to shoot underwater so you might want to do that with a GoPro the easiest way to get underwater is to get a camera which is already waterproof like this this is a Hero 5 black what you might want to do though is if you if underwater is like your priority is the thing you really want to specialize in even with a GoPro you might want to go don’t port this one is for the sea frogs sorted line for the sony a6000 don’t port for gopro as well connect to a really good series of them and lots of other people do as well but that helps you basically when you’re underwater and you’ve got your lens this one in for instance then the because the lens the light coming from the water to the air where your camera is that’s such kind of transition across two different mediums it means the let the the light bends a bit so don’t poor helps the light go more directly into your lens basically so for underwater shots a dome port can be the best option and I’ve certainly had the best results shink for a downpour I personally like to use a wider lens as possible so for me that’s a fisheye nine times out of ten because when you’re underwater and certainly in the UK or anywhere where the visibility isn’t amazing then you want to get as much of the subject of your shot as close to you as possible so if that’s a wave you want to be centimeters away from the wave to get the best shot to get the most clarity in that shot obviously being more pulled back as long as the water is clear enough you can still get a great shot you can get an even better shot but it the visibility tapers off really quickly I in my experience so there’s a really good example of this by Todd Glazer from his coffee table but proximity which went along with the movie so he talks in a couple of interviews I’ve listened I’ll put some links below but in podcast interviews he talks about the lens he used for that which was a rectilinear lens a bit like this Sony tend to 18 mill more details about that in the lens video he talks about that and he talks about using the underwater rather than a fisheye and it’s still quite wide angle though and there’s a great shot of I think it’s Kelly Slater in a tube and you can see it from a long way away and everyone loves those shots of people going past in a tube is ideal but you if you’re close enough then you can see the output through the face of the wave to the lip or to the land behind and sometimes the land behind isn’t crystal-clear it just it just gives you the colors and I’ve got a photo on my wall in fact a panoramic photo I went out specifically to get this exact photo am I like one of my local spots and I thought in the right light there’s there’s quite a orangie looking cliff and with the right texture on the water and the right light I knew I could get a I wanted a panoramic photo to go in a particular space in my house so I wanted to I wanted a long thin subjection I was like what a wave is that thing and an underwater wave at a certain spot where I know I can identify it from the shape of the cliff of the color of the cliff and there’s texture I’ll show you it it’s not that impressive for anyone else but for me personally I went out going for that shot in one session and I think I’d used the car member which one I think it was the maker 6.5 mil so very briefly I’ll tell you how I set that up it was in the liquid I see 6000 with a dome port and I focused as close as possible because as I’ve talked about have a look at the over/under video for more detail on this but basically you want to focus as close as possible with a fisheye normally to get the best results underwater if you’ve got a dome so you focus close as possible I cranked the aperture up because I wanted the widest depth of field and so I was on probably f/8 doesn’t sound that narrow an aperture but for underwater the light just cuts right out as soon as you go a couple of feet under the water the light’s dropping really rapidly because of the it’s hard for light to penetrate lots of water if there’s anything in it any debris in it so essentially you’re trying to battle you trying to get as much light as possible I think if you want some examples of the gold-standard underwater surf photography have a look at then through art I’m probably butchering that name he is a Tahitian photographer or at least a photographer who works in Tahiti on nationality but he has produced a book and a video to go along with it and it’s absolutely stunning and I will say underwater photography is one of the types of surf photography which I found it’s gets the best reaction from non surfers so this as well as over under over under is like that special gives you that little bit extra but underwater there’s no once you’ve got your camera set up once I’ve set that up as I’m shooting a close as possible fisheye lens I can kind of swim under the wave and blast away and technically I’m just all I’m doing is saying the shutter speed in that case because I’ve got manual lens so if I go one thousandth of a second focus my lens at close as possible shutter priority one one thousandth of a second f/8 and I just jump in there auto ISO I jump in and I’ve just my job then is to the waves coming towards me i dunk under the water and I’m looking up often a really good idea if you’re going to be just shooting underwater it’s wear a mask or goggles because obviously it’s really blurry if you just look with your eyes underwater it’s definitely possible I’ve done it but you don’t get to see that image that the camera is going to see so I would get some goggles or a mask and you want to be under the water quite far in advance and you this is one of those situations where you need to be 100% confident in your ability to swim in waves there’s only one way really I think to get that confidence level and that’s to be in waves a lot if we do that you need to training to be a very confident swimmer and you need to be familiar with the area and what the wave looks like and I only really attempt this this style of photography when I have surf that wave at least a few times I’ve ducked under the water I’ve snorkel around the area I’m making 100% sure that I know that what’s going on underneath the waves and you know as best I can I’m taking every precaution I can because underwater is can be the most dangerous place to be because people can’t see you there’s surfboards are lethal there’s there’s sharp bladed fiberglass and hard pointy lumps of fiberglass flying around all over the place they don’t know what they can’t see you there’s no way of you telling them to get that you’re there and yeah well let’s what you should do first is talk to the anyone who’s in the water and say yeah by the way I’m shooting underwater so let me give you an example I was in Tenerife in the Canary Islands in the in the Atlantic and there’s like this volcanic rock the reef is pretty unforgiving it’s quite sharp and there’s urgence and it’s it’s not a great place to be if there’s heavy waves breaking above you but it does look really nice and so there’s local three or four local body boarders at this particular spot we’ve been a couple of times and I it was quite a good day I didn’t want to get in their way by by surfing it so I went chatted to them in my broken Spanish always try and use your local language I mean this is common sense but trying your best to learn a few of the words especially the surf lingo words and explain what you want to do take I just took my housing down I said to – and a couple of guys I was like in very bad Spanish ok to take photos of the waves under the water and in pretty much perfect English the guy responded to me yeah no problem if you’re happy then then we’re happy so I essentially got had their permission which was good because it’s their spot and I wanted to make sure they knew I was gonna be underwater so I explained on this I’m gonna be under the water I will go out of your way and and I won’t be coming close to you but but Baron points you know just basically letting them know and they were cool with that and if they hadn’t been that I wouldn’t have done it but a nod also surf that spot two or three times already that week and I was familiar with it and it I knew what the surface doing I knew what I was doing and I’d done a lot of preparation so I felt confident enough to set up my maker fish i paddle out and I’ve seen these guys safe so I knew I knew what they were going to do on the waves roughly I knew that you know a couple of them like to write drop me it’s like one knee one foot on your body board and I thought that’s not look great under the water you can see that trailing Finn and their board in the wave so I went straight to where I thought they were going to be going past and you dunk under the water early and get down deep and look up so you can see what’s going on and then the aim is to get as close as you can without getting in their way without causing any problems for them but getting close enough that you can get that and because it’s such a wide angle lens I wanted to be a close I possibly could and I ended up getting a couple of nice ones of like it was also a midday bright sunshine so shots from the beach were pretty standard there was nothing really interesting going on from the beach so this was the perfect time to do it and that’s what I’d recommend doing she went again to underwater photography do it the middle of the day when you wouldn’t be shooting really interesting shots from the beach make sure you’ve got a bunch of people who know you’re there ideally who you know aren’t gonna fall off too badly and throw their board at you and but I I I’m kind of being overcautious perhaps I’m not I’m being the correct level of cautious when I’m explaining this to people who might not done it before but it’s something that you might well get used to and and if it’s something that you find rewarding then I think it’s one of those types of photography that really really translates well to non surface and it’s something that a lot of people never see even surfers generally don’t have that crystal-clear view because they don’t work or they don’t wear masks and people who are snorkeling don’t tend to smoke or in the surf zone so it’s one of those again experiences that images that people just can’t see with their naked eye or can’t get into the position to see it so it’s something that is delightful to people who haven’t seen it before so I’ll show you these two this type of image to my relatives you want surfers and it’ll blow their mind and they’ll want a picture of it they’ll want a print for me and stuff like that and I’ll show them a day of days the best it’s never been at my local surf spot pick pitching bow someone doing a big arrow some some really like some surf shot that I’d be blue would blow me away my favorite show ever and they they’re like yeah who cares I mean I’ve seen that on it when advert on the telly it’s not it’s not a big deal but then you show them a one-foot day of the perfect lip bubbles bubbling up those cool like vortex things coming round round the bottom of the wave and yeah that’ll blow their mind so I think it’s really really rewarding option if you’re finding yourself if you find that non surfer friends family are not super stoked on the photos you’re coming up with try some underwater stuff and I would say that’s going to that’s going to get them interested then you can you know sell them on why the other photos that you’ve taken it took such a long time to and hard work to get and why you’re so proud of them but yeah this is a good entry that entry into that for them so hopefully that’s explain a little bit about how to get those underwater style photos and in terms of actual technique when you’re underwater like I say I use the widest lens like possibly can so that I can get everything in and then it’s a case of especially if you got goggles or a mask it’s kind of practice and water aiming and Composition but generally speaking get as close as you can to the action and fire away high-speed bursts you know five or six shots of each wave it’s probably gonna go to get as it goes past if it’s gone a bit further way don’t even bother because the water the further away it gets the less you’re gonna see and it is really hard to get a good shot when you’re quite far away so yeah I get close get comfortable under the water be very familiar with the spot and that’s how you gonna get the best results