bertstephani

Hi,

I'm not much of a real underwater photographer but I've doing a lot of reading and learning here because a while ago I had a job (I'm a professional "land" photographer) that required to shoot a jewelry collection underwater. The designer got her inspiration from the underwater world, so shooting the promotional pictures underwater made sense. Since I learned so much about equipment and other stuff here, I wanted to share this image with you.



I'm an occasional scuba diver and I wanted to get that magical feeling of being underwater in the shots. Because there's no open water that's warm and clear enough for model shooting here in Belgium, we tried to replicate that open water look in a swimming pool. This picture was made with an Olympus E-PL1 and a 14-42 kitlens in an Olympus housing with flat port. There's no ambient light in the picture. This was lit with a studio strobe on the side of the pool and two Inon flashes with CTO gels underwater.

Let me know what you think.

Hi all,

I've been photographing for a couple of years (and turned photography into my job) but only topside. A couple of months ago I bought an Olympus E-PL1, an Olympus housing and an Inon S-2000 flash for a job in a swimming pool. Last year I also took up diving again but I never had an urge to do any diving photography. But since I got the camera, I took it with me on a dive in Holland. Prior to this dive, I'd only tested the camera out in a pool a couple of times.

The Dive:
Last May we visited a site in The Netherlands (I'm from Belgium) called "Bergse Diepsluis" to see if we could find the sepias that come here around that time. At 9 meters the visibility was so bad (less than 50cm) that we couldn't see each other even when swimming shoulder to shoulder. On top of that my buddy got some minor ear troubles and I struggled with holding that brand new camera while doing all the other diving things like navigating, checking my computer, adjusting my BCD, ... No need to say that it wasn't much fun so we quickly decided to head back to shore. Between 1 and 2 meters of depth the visibility was around a meter so we decided to spend the rest of the dive looking around in a small area where we found a willing photo subject.



The Shot:
I suddenly saw a small jellyfish passing by, a very common sight but the thing with common things is that you quickly take them for granted and don't give them a second look. But since there was not much else to see, I decided to try to photograph the jellyfish. I set my camera manually to ISO400, 1/160 and f/8 to block out the ambient light and still get some depth of field. The Inon S-2000 (on a short flexible arm) was on TTL and did a great job exposing the subject. I asked my buddy to backlight the Jellyfish with her dive light.
I only did some contrast and color tweaking in Lightroom. I left the floating particles in the shot because I think these are part of diving in our area.

I don't consider this to be a great image compared to all the beautiful stuff in this forum but it was my first halfway decent underwater shot, so I'd be happy to hear what you guys think.