A Conversation With… ESPEN REKDAL

Welcome to the fourth instalment in this series, to add to the previous interviews A Conversation With Todd Mintz and Rand McMeins, a A Conversation With Martin Edge and A Conversation With the Fotosub boys.

This month you join me with the World Champion! In June, at Jeju Island South Korea, Espen Rekdal of Norway was named the 12th CMAS World Champion of Underwater Photography. The CMAS world championship is usually held every other year and typically attracts between 35-50 photographers from 20-30 nations. The first world championship took place in 1979 and was won my Mario Zucchi of Italy.

Now its fair to say that many readers might be surprised to learn that underwater photography has a world champion. That is not to belittle their achievements it is more a reflection on the press coverage, or rather lack of it, the event attracts. Hopefully, Espen’s success will change this. He is no competition specialist and I have long been a fan of his images.

Stylistically, I believe he is an intelligent and technical shooter, he shoots supermacros with breathtaking control of focus and depth of field, and faultlessly lit wide angle images. But he is also and artist, and has the vision to turn everyday subjects into graphic masterpieces. And finally, his training as a marine biologist means his portfolio contains many rare and unique images, particularly from his home waters of Norway, where he lives with his wife Shanay and daughter Elena.

Since Espen is technical shooter, this interview was a chance to get my teeth into some quality techie stuff on lighting, strobes and techniques. We discuss not just controlling the quantity of light in photos, but also what goes into producing the quality of light we want in our underwater images. We also talk a bit about fisheye photography and supermacro, including one of Espen’s recent specialities, open water supermacro.

Finally, when photographers get together they invariably discuss the work of well known photographers. We all do it and it is often fascinating, but hard to put in print without risking offending. Espen and I get into the Doubilet versus Newbert classic, which actually reads fine, so it makes the edit for once! Hopefully everyone will read it in the respectful tone it was spoken!

Alex: Congratulations Mr World Champion! Was it an enjoyable event? Or only after the results?!
Espen: Thanks. Well, I actually didn’t have any expectation this time. I have had quite a few disappointments down the years, because of the way the points work. Especially when I have won the most categories, but not overall.
Alex: So despite winning this time, it probably wasn’t your best performance in a world championship?
Espen: Yeah, I think I did better in Marseille and in l’Estatit…
Alex: Interesting. So will this be the start of a Carlos Minguell style domination or is this a chance for you to draw a line under competing?
Espen: Who knows? I’d be quite happy to retire now, but there is always the temptation of free trips! But I have three bronzes and one gold from the last four events I’ve entered. It is hard to top, and in all probability I won’t win next time. So maybe it is a good time to give it up.
Competing is a great way to get yourself known, but you might do yourself a disservice if you stay in it too long, because you become too influenced by what does well in competition rather than what is good photography. You might stop playing around with ideas. Some people say you have to be creative in competitions, but I think it is actually the opposite. You become less creative because you are trying to please someone else [the judges] the whole time.
Alex: Most of the judges have similar tastes. Competition shots have to wow, there is no room for subtlety.
Espen: Exactly, if you do a photo story not every image should have that impact. They need to work together to build the story. There is much more to photography than competition photography.

Continued on page 2

A Conversation With… ESPEN REKDAL - page 2

Alex: I have always admired your lighting and I’d like to talk in detail about how you make it work. A lot of photographers think that using strobes is just about getting some light on the subject and not getting any backscatter. Job done. I feel that you pay a huge attention to the quality of the light, it is not just about quantity. Is there any underlying philosophy to your wide angle lighting?
Espen: There is a fine line between creating shadows and creating depth and perspective. If you are too uneven with your lighting you get harsh shadows that deteriorate the photo, unless you are using that as an effect.
Alex: For me, worse than the strong shadows are strong highlights, because they pull the eye more. Your eye goes straight to it and it destroys the composition.
Espen: This picture (Espen points at his laptop, which from memory is the image above) has shadows, which really irritate me.
Alex: I disagree, those are tiny, they give texture and shape.
Espen: I think that these are too harsh. But if you get shadows in small places, that three-dimensionalizes things.
Alex: To go back a step, lighting choices start with strobe choices. And like me you are a big fan of using large powerful, European strobes with wide diameter circular flash tubes…
Espen: … and very nice coverage. I think that the coverage is so important for you to be able to position the strobes to use the light creatively. If you use narrow beam strobes you are so limited in how you can angle them, because you risk not hitting the subject, which limits where you can put the light. You could pull them back, but then you are loosing power.
Alex: You use the same two strobes that I use (Subtronic and Inon). To summarise for those who’ll read this, I choose to use the Subtronics for all my wide angle in reasonable to good visibility, and I use my Inons for macro in any conditions. Also I prefer my Inons for wide angle in bad viz because I find the narrower beam easier to control to eliminate backscatter. Have you ever tried shooting wide angle with your Inons?
Espen: Yes, but I find myself disappointed. Of course the Subtronics are difficult to travel with, so I can’t always take them. But for competitions always.
Alex: That style of strobe has a quality of light that is very hard to replicate. I have built softboxes for my Inons, which can replicate the softness and coverage of the Subtronics, but you loose a lot of power, spreading the light. But that is for when I can’t travel with the Subtronics for weight.
Espen: My choice of Inons was actually by coincidence. I have always been a fan of Ikelite strobes for the light. I used them since ’96 and especially their Substrobe 50s, the small ones. I had six of those and I would travel with two film systems both rigged with two of those strobes, with two strobes as spares. And for longer trips I would need to take spare circuit boards.
Alex: I like light of their wide angle strobes too.

Espen: I have used the Ikelite 200s and 100s previously. But again mine were prone to failures and living in Europe and not the United States it was difficult to get them repaired.
Anyway, at the time I switched to digital Ikelite could not give me a strobe that would TTL, neither could Inon, but they had more manual powers. The Ikelite 51 was not out yet. So I bought the Inons and found that although the Sea & Sea TTL converter is not supposed to work with the D2X, it was actually the most reliable model of camera to use it with. Which suited me perfectly.
Alex: I don’t shoot TTL, mainly because I don’t own a TTL converter, but you are a big fan of it for macro?
Espen: Yeah. I get very reliable exposures straight from the camera. But don’t get me wrong, I post process images, my aim is the finished product.
Alex: I agree that is just a realist’s view on modern photography. We all shot film, we all got great slides, but the world has changed now and there is no point putting your head in the sand.
Espen: And I think that post processing is a big part of photography today.
Shanay (Espen’s wife): Even before because after you have scanned you still had to adjust the files for printing.
Alex: That’s true. In so many books in the pure slide days, so much Photoshop was done by the printers with the excuse “just to make it good for printing”. “We’ll take that diver out, just to make it good for printing!”
Espen: Ha ha. Or to make that headline fit.
Alex: Tauchen moved a diver on one of my shots for a cover. It is not a particularly great picture, but it is very suitable cover and it has been on lots of magazines, so I often use it in talks, so its fun to point it out.
Espen: Where were we? Exposures. In the competitions I am a big fan of histograms, I can see my exposure is correct and I don’t get any surprises. When using the TTL converter I can check the histogram and if it is too much one way or the other I can adjust it for that subject.
Alex: But actually it doesn’t need much adjusting?
Espen: No. It is important to get exposures correct, otherwise it will begin to tear at the quality of the final picture. So I always try and optimise the exposure for the best RAW file. There is always the balance between the ambient and reflected light from the flash, and sometimes my meter can come back with weird values.
Alex: Do you spot meter for blues?
Espen: No, normally I just look at the light meter on matrix and compensate, sometimes I have to go as far as –2 or –2.5.
Alex: Interestingly the newer cameras are different. Actually this is not interesting, this is really boring techie stuff, but when you go to the D3 or D700 you do not need as much underexposure to get a good blue on matrix metering. So instead of dialling in –1.7 or so, you can shoot the same blues at say –0.3 or even 0 EV. I can only assume that there is an underwater reference image in the software.
Espen: The advantage of using an old camera is that you can always blame the camera if you don’t win in the competition!
Alex: Ha ha. And if you do win, well, “its an old camera, so it is all me!”

Espen: Ha ha. I am currently looking for new strobes because next year I am changing my camera. Hopefully Nikon will come out with a DX camera, say a D400 in the 15-16 megapixel range. That would be perfect.
Alex: You’d prefer to stick to DX than go to full frame?
Espen: Yes, I can only see myself using full frame in very few situations. Fast action, low light scenes. But then I will just borrow one.
Alex: I would strongly consider going back to DX too, with a camera like that. To finish off on strobes, you like wide beam, soft light, good coverage for wide angle. Anything else?
Espen: I’d rather under expose a bit on the strobes. People tend to overshoot on the strobes.
Alex: Too much light. It’s a mistake I make.
Espen: Because I find that this makes the gradation between flash light and ambient light a bit more natural.
Alex: I think that the soft light makes such a difference too, is this respect. So strobe positioning?
Espen: A lot of people laugh at me when I arrive with my long, long strobe arms. They are heavy, they are bulky, tough to travel with and not always easy to work with underwater, but they give you more options when it comes to positioning the light. It is important to vary your light. It is not that flat light is the optimum goal, you need a balance. Sometimes I want my strobes really far back, sometimes I want them on the port. Long arms allow both. It depends on the situation.
The long arms give the option to pull them way back, or put them both on the left or right, or put them on the long or the short side of the frame, which will also give different effects. You don’t want to limit yourself, you want to be able to put them wherever you need. And that means long arms.
Alex: I also think that you are someone who thinks quite originally on these things. You work out what you want and then how to do it, rather than just doing what others do. For example with your macro bracket, which is a ring that mounts onto your port, so you can mount your strobes and your TTL converter there.
Espen: …but the big advantage is that it rotates. So it is less than a second to adjust them. If you have a crack in the rock and your are shooting macro you can put the strobes in the crack and then tilt the camera to the orientation you want and fire, without moving the strobes each time. But it does restrict me, because I can’t move my strobes out from my macro port very much.
Alex: I see on your Inons that you shoot them without diffusers for macro, well it looks like there is a very weak diffuser on there with the warming gels?
Espen: Actually I think it is just opaque because of the salt crystals! I use a slighting warming filter on the Inons because I was finding them a little too cold for macro. And I would probably warm them even more for wide angle, down to about 4300K. The filters on them now take them to about 4800K, no big secret there.
Alex: I think that is a good area for most people. Warm them further than that and the cameras can get a bit confused on Auto white balance. I find if the water is a greeny-blue and I shoot very warm strobes the camera seems to panic and add too much magenta. It is not an issue when shooting with a manual Kelvin white balance, but not everyone wants to do that.
Espen: I always shoot in manual Kelvin white balance because I want the colour consistent in my shots.
Alex: I do much of the time, but I will shoot Auto in less controlled conditions, for example where camera to subject distances might be unpredictable, such as with more active subjects.
OK, to move onto techniques, you are a big fisheye fan, but unlike many underwater photographers you often don’t try and hide the barrel distortion of the lens, but use it creatively.
Espen: I like circles. Bent horizons, I use that a lot as a signature in my work.
Alex: That’s true. One theory I have is that many photographers find these specific visual elements in their work because of where they learned to shoot or shoot most often. And then when they travel they look for these same elements and continue to incorporate them in their work. The Norwegian fjords have strong currents, but often flat protected waters, suited to splits, Snell’s window or reflection shots, and the exposure different between the sky and dark green waters in pronounced, encouraging one to play with the shapes of Snell’s window.
Espen: It’s that, but also in Norway you have to get so close because the water is not always clear. So distortion comes naturally. But it can also help make an interesting composition: if I have a circular shaped subject in the photo, I can then create another circle with the surface.

Alex: Its repeating patterns, repeating shapes, which make for powerful compositions.
Espen: Exactly.
Alex: You’re a big fan of colour too.
Espen: I like colour when I can find it. You are trying to find colour, you are trying to find shapes, to use as a powerful primary subject. And I like the diver to be like a visitor or a peripheral subject in the composition. I am not selling dive equipment. I’ll leave those photos for others.
Alex: Thank you.
Both: Ha ha ha.
Alex: Another aspect I like in your photography, is despite being a marine biologist you don’t shoot particularly scientifically. You cover behaviours, but your images must work visually too. How do you get the balance?
Espen: There are a lot of behaviour shots where the pictures don’t turn out beautiful. In which case I toss them. In the whole package isn’t there, it is not a picture. The first priority is that it has to be a technically well-packaged picture. If the behaviour is there, then that is a bonus, but it is not the most important criterion.
There are many opinions on what is photography and how to show things. I am a very technical guy. If a picture doesn’t have a technical quality then it isn’t a good picture.
Alex: I don’t think it is a big issue for editorial, but I do think it is essential in a competition. In an “underwater photography competition”, for me, the photographer has to show a good ability at underwater photography.
Espen: A lot of people get too caught up in new ideas, rather than actual images.
Alex: It is a mistake I see in my own work. I get excited about trying something new and get so focused on trying to make it work, that I forget that the all that matters is the end result. Not how I get there.

Continued on page 3

A Conversation With… ESPEN REKDAL - page 3

After an off tape discussion about influences while looking through some more of Espen’s shots, there was lots of juicy info coming up, so I decide to restart the tape!
Alex: To change subject, there has always been a high turnover of people in underwater photography. It is a hobby, a passion people get. They get the bug, get good enough to win competitions and then having proved to themselves they can do it, kind of drop away and loose interest and get another hobby.
And the result of all this is that the community has quite a short memory. Of course there are lots of guys who have been shooting for 30, 40 years, but a high percentage of the community has been around much less time.
You could go on Wetpixel and ask how many people could describe three of Chris Newbert’s pictures. I don’t know how many could, without a quick google. The community has a short memory and people forget what an influence his work had on photographers who started in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Espen: What was revolutionary about Chris Newbert was that he started abstract underwater photography.
Alex: I think he really made that leap from simply showing the underwater world as it is, because most people had never seen it, to using natural history subjects as the starting point for his photographic vision. It wasn’t about the subjects…
Espen: …it was about colours, textures, patterns and compositions. He was simple in his technique. But he’d shoot things Doubilet wouldn’t. Doubilet would do more wide angle at that time, Well, his wide angle and light is what I remember him for.
Alex: They are both still alive!
Espen: Ha ha ha. I meant I remember his work at that time for those qualities! Doubilet was the major influence on my photography in my early years. He was the guy you wanted to be.
Alex: We were both at school still at that time, but older photographers who I know well tell me that in the late 80s a lot of people preferred Newbert’s stuff [Doubilet’s Light In The Sea was published in 1989 and Newbert’s Within A Rainbowed Sea was published in 1986, I think]. But looking back now, I think Newbert’s images have less impact because they were more easily copied and versions of them have been everywhere for 20 years.
I think David Doubilet’s work from that period has stood the test of time better, perhaps because it is not so easy to emulate. But I’d say Newbert’s photos from that time had a bigger influence on the way people shoot, because his ideas were more widely copied, but as a result seem more ordinary now. Of course, when he was the first person to do them, they really blew people away. If that makes sense?
Espen: Patterns are very easy technically. When I started out, my Mum bought me Light In The Sea, which I loved. A few years later, when I started to study marine biology, one of my tutors had Christopher Newbert’s book, the first one, and that one really shook me up. “This guy is so good, I am never going to get that good!” I really thought it was a masterpiece.
So David’s was the start, then Newbert took over. That is what got me off shooting macro and super macro, and to find patterns in Norway I had to go for the really tiny stuff. In many places where you don’t imagine there is lots of macro, it is just a case of getting small enough. It opens up a whole new world of subjects.
Alex: Well that is one of the amazing things with your portfolio, you have so many subjects that I have never seen before. It is rare that someone opens their laptop and you see that.
Espen: Maybe that is what people are doing wrong, everybody rushes off to the same destinations, shooting the same subjects. And because they have already seen other people’s shots of those same subjects, it influences them to shoot the same shot.
You have got to go to different places and find new subjects to shoot to stand out in the crowd. You can do it with subject selection or you can do it with technique. Of course, it requires a lot of practice to really get on top of these techniques. We are taking very small depth of field.

I remember coming to Egypt in 2000 for the world championship, and I met these two Brazilian photographers in the elevator and they were asking me what lens I had because it was so long. I had a 105mm, with teleconverter, spacer, dioptres. And a few years later after I won a category with a supermacro, the following competition had everyone shooting teleconverters.
Alex: I think some of your most amazing recent images are with the technique that few others are brave enough to try: open water supermacro. Personally, I don’t understand why you would shoot that. It is the hardest thing I could imagine shooting. I watch copepods on safety stops, and they are hard enough just to see, let alone photograph.
Espen: The technique is quite simple. It is free drifting. Obviously, you need a very powerful extender and a good portion of patience. You don’t do this on your travels. You do this when you are home and diving in your backyard, which I am often.
So you swim out, there is always a current running. You find your subject and then you stop swimming, trying and get your buoyancy perfect. So you find yourself drifting at the same speed as what you are trying to photograph. Then it just a case of bobbing back and forth, with the focus locked on minimum and waiting until you see something sharp, then shoot.
Alex: The pictures are phenomenal – I know they are your secret at the moment. Difficulty-wise, it’s unbelievable.
Espen: There is so much stuff just floating around. Small stuff that nobody shoots. So last summer I just spend most of my dives just bobbing around in the plankton.
Alex: That seems a good place to leave you, floating in the plankton! Thank you, Espen!

Espen Rekdal

Next month Alex enjoys A Conversation With one of the legends of underwater photography, Kurt Amsler.