Underwater Photography

My course was run over three weeks, with 30 dives at a maximum ratio of 2 students:1 instructor and 45 hours in the classroom.

The price is 62,500 Baht (approximately £1400) and includes all the camera equipment needed, although obviously it is best to have your own.

I chose this course because there didn’t seem to be anything else suitable for someone like me: someone who had absolutely zero knowledge of photography, yet who wanted way more than the PADI DUP course could offer.

Another friend, a pro land photographer, told me to become proficient with the camera before I even considered taking it underwater. This, of course was excellent advice, but as I didn’t get the camera until three days before my trip, it wasn’t advice I could follow!

The first five days started with using the camera and the TTL (Through The Lens) function on the strobe and then day 2 adding the macro lens and using the manual setting on the strobe. It took two days before I even learned the basic camera functions, but with patient tutelage, I managed to produce a few good shots. It felt as though everything I was told just further underlined how much I didn’t know! But by the third day, I felt it was coming together: instead of focusing on the shots, I was focusing on the learning and it was starting to make sense.

Having been an MSDT for twenty years with several thousand dives, I naturally considered my buoyancy and situational awareness to be very good. However, hovering next to a wall, shooting a 1cm crab on a whip coral from six inches away, with a negative camera set-up, I felt more like an open water student! Over the first week, I managed to bump into a sea urchin while contorting myself into the necessary position to get a shot and I also found myself regularly neglecting to pay sufficient attention to my air consumption and NDL’s – something I have spent years warning my customers about.

My evenings were spent using Lightroom (also covered thoroughly on the course), editing, making my homework portfolios, but mostly deleting! On average I was deleting 80-90% of my shots each day!

By day 5, I felt reasonably confident and comfortable, experimenting more with apertures and depth of field.

But then the macro lens was packed away and out came the wide angle…..

The next five days were all learning the wide angle lens and dome port. Here the lighting became more complex as I learned about lighting the shot using both the strobes and ambient light. This is also when I started to play more with the ISO and shutter speed settings. The course also included two days using magic filters and learning white balance – another of those terms I’d heard of, but had no idea about. It was halfway through the first filter dive, that I realised I’d forgotten to do the white balance – thank goodness for post processing!

Do I feel like a pro photographer? Well maybe not quite yet; but I have all the tools and information I need now. A little more practice and I’ll soon feel confident enough to claim the title!

Apart from the course content, I also learned how easy it is to get tunnel vision; so much focus is on the camera and the shot, it is easy, (no matter how experienced) to forget the very basics, such as checking NDL’s and air consumption!

I learned to be patient, to wait for the right shot and finally, which end is the business end of a nudibranch….

Check www.dive4photos.com to check for course dates and more information.