It was a dark and stormy night… yes, seriously it was a dark and stormy night!

The deck of the 65′ sloop Sea Explorer heaved like a beast possessed, as she struggled through the ten-foot waves that turned the surface of the ocean around me into a madly-undulating vision of watery hell. Freezing cold saltwater-spray stung my face and hands as I clutched at the companionway hatch to stop myself from being thrown across the deck. Waves crashed over the bow with appalling regularity, having the decency at least to wash the assorted… detritus, over the side. Even with my sea-sickness meds, I could feel my stomach start to argue with its contents… soon, I too would join the ranks of those huddled in misery in the inner ‘horse-shoe’, a large fibreglass series of benches that took up most of the mid and fore-deck. They huddled for warmth, huddled for protection against the elements, huddled for that last spark of human touch before we sank to our inevitable oblivion in the inky brine that made up the Gulf Stream off of Florida’s coast.

“Nice night isn’t it!!!” bellowed the Captain with a cheerful grin, as he clutched the wheel and rode the madness with practiced ease. He was an evil character, replete with dark foul-weather gear that was obviously purchased used, a decade ago, no doubt to match his black and tormenting soul. The only thing he lacked was a parrot and an eye patch. Most of the rest of the crew were down below-deck in the salon, tucking into their own suppers with gusto, immune to this monstrous tempest; merely another day on the job.

Ok, maybe I’m waxing a little melodramatic, but damnit, I earned the right! This was my second of three trips with Blackbeard Cruises, a live-aboard dive excursion (now based in Freeport, the Bahamas) that sailed out of Miami. This meant that you had to do ‘The Crossing’, which referred to crossing the Gulf Stream from Florida over to the out-islands of the Bahamas. The Crossing normally lasted between 8 to 10 hours, and yes, you really could tell someone capitalized the letters when they said those two words. With the prevailing winds coming out of the east, and the current of the Gulf Stream heading north / north-east, the result in the winter could be a 10 hour trip-from-hell as the forces at work pulled the waves this way and that. On a previous trip, a friend of mine from Georgia in the US had spent the entire crossing in the forward head (bathrooms at sea are called heads), being continuously seasick. On that trip, my meds worked much better and I wasn’t sick at all, and I was odiously smug about it. After this second cruise, I had to call him up and offer a profuse apology for the lack of sympathy that I had shown, at the time. The best way to describe a trip on Blackbeards is ‘Camping at Sea’.

After losing the remains of my supper (remember, always to the lee-side, away from the wind!), I joined my fellow-victims in their meagre shelter and waited for our certain and unavoidable death.

Of course, it was only a few hours later (though I do assure you it felt like an eternity) that we made safe-harbour at the island of North Bimini, a tiny speck of land principally famous for it’s fishing (Ernest Hemmingway spent much time here), and for being the place where the final scene in the Silence of the Lambs was filmed (I’m having an old friend for dinner). Most importantly to us scuba-divers, it was sheltered and the boat magnanimously decided to stop trying to kill us. Finally we could stumble down to our bunks and try and get some sleep.

The sun rose and showed us all what paradise looks like.

Calm turquoise waters in the shallows, fading out into a deep, emerald-green sea. The skies were sapphire-blue, marred only by a random sprinkling of pristinely white seabirds that floated by, calling out as if laughing at our fears from the night before. The cheerful, competent, wonderful Captain and crew (I had forgiven them by about the point I smelled the coffee), rounded us up to have breakfast and to deal with our customs paperwork. I recommend starting off with porridge, if you’ve been seasick (trust me on this).

And then, it was time to go diving.

…

I have two passions in life, scuba-diving and photography (being intermittently-single, I occasionally have a third, but I digress). I have been diving since early 2002, and it certainly didn’t take me long to decide that I needed to document and record the wonders that I was experiencing, to share with others. I had two options to do this with, still-photography or underwater-video. I have always been a passionate shutterbug; I am pretty sure I would never be a good film-maker, so it wasn’t that difficult of a decision to make (Mr. Spielberg, you can now let out that sigh of relief).

If you’re a diver, you can chose from two types of dive-trips. There is the land-based dive trip, where you would normally do two to three dives per day, staying in a hotel, in a nice stationary room, with maid service and a thrice-daily buffet to gorge upon. I have done these kinds of trips, and they have their own unique charm (usually found sunbathing on the beach).

The other type of dive trip is the live-aboard, and this is what I’m going to focus this article on. This is where you insanely think that since your ancestors obviously came over to North America on a boat, it cannot possibly be that difficult. On a live-aboard you and up to 20+ other divers are on a boat, usually between 60 and 100 feet long. You are usually in sight of land (even if only an isolated and desolate key), the weather is usually nice, and the food is usually quite good. Usually. There is no beach, and consequently nothing on the beach to look at / talk with / party with. Those are the negatives.

The biggest benefit to this type of trip is that you will get in between four and five dives per day. Eat, sleep, and dive. If you are a passionate-enough scuba diver that the idea of camping at sea appeals to you in the first place, the live-aboard is… usually, going to win out each and every time.

The low end of the live-aboard spectrum is the Blackbeard-type cruises, where they quite literally say, “All Twice the fun at half the cost”. They usually will set you back about $800.00 USD, excluding airfare, but do include all your food, drinks (including alcohol, more on that later), and diving.

The high-end of the live-aboard industry is the Aggressor, Aqua-Cat or Peter Hughes type adventure, which would normally run you approximately $1,700.00-$2,500.00 USD per person. Again, all inclusive, these are more like luxury yachts, with private rooms, maid service and even hot-tubs. The other big-ticket item is of course airfare… flying Toronto to Nassau is not that bad, but if you want to go to Palau in the south Pacific, well maybe hold off on having that second child. You’re going to need a good part of his/her education money to give to the airlines.

A statement about drinking and diving: Every single dive operation that I have used has a rule; if you have a drink of any kind of alcoholic beverage, your dive day is over. This is a golden-rule and it is unbreakable. Diving, though being classified as a leisure activity is an activity that contains certain calculated risks. While demonstrably safer than bowling (especially in a lane beside me), it is only as safe as your behaviour and your performance makes it. Drinking impairs your ability to make rational judgments, and in an activity where there is a real probability of getting nitrogen narcosis (i.e., narced), being even slightly inebriated is a VERY BAD IDEA. I’ll save the medical and legalese talk to someone more capable than I to address, but just go with me on this one, ok? Thanx.

—

Underwater photography is a burgeoning activity for tens of thousands of divers, and what is driving this is the advent of digital imaging and the fact that there are more and more certified recreational scuba-divers each and every year. An underwater housing is now almost a standard accessory for a company to produce for their point and shoot camera lines, as a day-at-the-beach and consumer electronics tends to not mix well. Engineering something that is rain-and-sand-proof into something that is waterproof to a depth of 130′ isn’t that much more of a stretch, and opens up their target market to people that may have previously overlooked their offerings.

Some of the allure of diving is so obvious that it figuratively hits you over the head, each and every time you jump in the water. The clarity, the feeling of weightlessness, the Zen-like calm; it is another world down there. Now literally, your dive-buddy could hit you in the head as he jumps in after you, so make sure you don’t just sit there gaping. Move away from the entry-port and make room for the others. ;-) It’s a big ocean, after all.

Photography underwater is very much like photography on land, however there are a few key areas that you need to focus on; specifically, specialized gear, dive conditions and photography skills, and your dive skills. Post-processing is also important, but not more important or intensive than you are already used to (assuming you’re using a dSLR), so I will not touch on it in this article.

Dive & Photography Equipment

Scuba Diving is a gear-intensive activity; the best way to view all that dive-gear is to consider it a life-support system. This is especially true because of the concentration that you must exhibit as an underwater photographer; it is critically important that you are completely confident in your gear, and your ability to maintain, assemble, service and care for it. Photography is a secondary consideration on any dive; your safety and the safety of your dive-buddy is your primary consideration.

That being said, I am not going to touch much on dive gear, as this is supposed to be a photography article, so if you’re interested in diving and the gear that is used, drop me an email or, better yet, head down to a dive-shop near you and get certified. There’s always room in the pool for another diver.

In terms of camera gear, I personally use a digital SLR that is no different from the one that you are probably using above-water right now. However, I am using a third-party, professionally engineered underwater housing system made by a company called Ikelite (other companies include Aquatica, Nexus, and Subal, among others). This is essentially a polycarbonate housing that has various control-rods, buttons and dials that penetrate the housing, allowing me to actuate almost every single control of my camera.

The front of the housing is open, and allows me to put different ‘ports’ on the housing. A dome-port is used for wide-angle lenses, while a flat-surfaced port is used for macro. The need for different ports is due to the nature and effect that water has on the light. I cannot change lenses underwater; the lens/port combination that I start with on a dive is with me for the whole dive. I will not go into the technical properties of light underwater, except in regards to how it affects the colour spectrum.

Both the rear cover of the housing and the front port of the housing (and indeed, each and every control) have what is called an O-ring. An O-ring is a rubber or vinyl band that is compressed between the two sections when you latch them together. The O-ring is what makes the housing watertight, and is the single most important element of the underwater setup. A single strand of hair or a grain of sand can cause the O-ring to fail, letting water into the housing and causing your camera to stop working, most times, permanently. Underwater photographers all say that it is not if a housing will flood, but when. I have not yet had a housing flood, however it is only a matter of time. Doing proper O-ring maintenance, and getting your housing serviced by the manufacturer on a regular basis will lengthen the odds. It is because of this that most underwater photographers will carry supplemental insurance on their underwater and photographic gear.

Once you have your camera loaded into your housing, the lens that you want to use that dive attached, and the appropriate front-port also attached, your next step would be to add the strobe(s). Most high-end housings have a hot-shoe adapter that slides into the camera’s hot-shoe inside the housing, while the other end comes through the housing wall to a waterproof electrical connection on the back or side. To this connection, you would then attach one or more waterproof strobe-lights, not very different from what you would see in a traditional photographic studio, though necessarily more compact.

Strobes are necessary because of the nature of ambient light in water. The further from the surface that you are, the more the spectrum of visible light is filtered out. For instance by the time you hit 33’ below the surface, you no longer have any red light left in the spectrum, and by the time you hit 130’, the only colour left is blue. This makes an artificial light source critical to taking good underwater images.

Another aspect of underwater lighting is that it becomes highly desirable to move the strobes are far as possible from the lens axis. This is done because if the strobe is close to the lens, tiny particles in the water will reflect back light and can conceivably ruin an otherwise spectacular shot. This effect is called back-scatter, and can be remedied by putting the strobes on ‘arms’ that can move them away from the camera axis. The normal distance is around 18” to 24” away from the body of the housing, however some more specialized rigs can move the strobe out to almost 36”.

Modern dive-strobes can also double as dive-lights for night diving. Similar to the modelling function in a studio, the strobe makes using a primary dive-light unnecessary on a night dive, however as always you should carry a back-up dive light in case of equipment failure.

The last important piece of gear that I have on a dive-trip for photography is a portable storage device. I’m already lugging up to 70lbs of dive gear and clothing, a hard-case (carry-on size) for my camera housing and strobe(s), and a back-pack for my toiletries and other assorted odds and ends. If you’re a single traveller, adding a laptop to the mix would probably be madness; the first part of your trip, you feel much more like a pack-mule than a photographer! Modern portable storage devices are small, have a built in screen allowing you to view images and usually can hold 40 to 80 gigs of data. From a week-long dive trip, I am likely to bring back 10 to 20 gigs of images.

Dive Conditions and Photography Skills

Each and every dive is a planned dive, with a formal dive-briefing. There is little spontaneity in that you know before jumping in the water the topography of the dive-site, the surface conditions, the current, and you will have a decent idea of the visibility and the water temperature. All of these elements are important to the choices you make when you are setting up your camera and housing.

For instance, if the dive site is a shallow, 25’ dive, with calm conditions and is over an extensive coral system, you are most likely to take a macro lens that you can use for both macro and reef-fish portraiture. If the dive-site is a wall dive, where the wall drops off into the abyss, you are most likely going to set up your system to take wide-angle shots, hoping that a Hammerhead Shark, an Eagle Ray or even the elusive Giant Squid (ok, just kidding on that last one) swims past.

The visibility of the dive-site will also make a huge difference. If you only have 10 feet of visibility, then it is much more likely you will get usable images from a macro lens than a wide-angle. Macro shooting in the ocean has its own unique kind of charm, and some of the best photographs I have taken were done only inches from the subject.

The temperature of the water is also important to you as an underwater photographer. Digital cameras give off heat, and when surrounded by cooler water, this heat can cause fogging inside the camera housing. The easiest way to keep this from happening is to load the camera into the housing in a cool, air-conditioned space, as this air is normally quite dry. Additionally you may want to put a small desiccant packet into the housing to help absorb any of the humidity from the air inside the housing, once it has been sealed.

In terms of actually taking pictures underwater, there is a general rule of thumb to follow… get closer and shoot angled slightly upwards. This will enable you to capture as much of the back-ground ambient light as possible, using your strobe(s) for fill flash.

And if you think you’re close enough, get closer, because you aren’t! Shoot, get closer. Shoot… well, you get the idea. Your exposure and f-stops will vary from shot to shot, but a good, general place to start off with is f8 at 1/125th.
Use your histogram! Given that you are looking at the display on your camera through your dive-mask, water, and your housing, it will be impossible to get a really accurate sense of how your shots are turning out, so using the histogram to tell you if you are over or underexposing is a must. Once you get used to using the histogram, everything else is dead-easy and you probably won’t go back, even for above water photography. The histogram is the digital photographer’s best friend.

Night dives are some of the most thrilling diving that you can do, and the creatures that come out at night are entirely different from those that are around during the daytime. Some of the best night-dive photo opportunities are lobsters, crabs and octopi. It is at night when certain types of coral polyps normally open up to feed, and even to mate.

Dive Skills

In recreational diving, there is an adage that photographers make the worst dive-buddies, and this is a true statement, but only to the extent that you let it. You have to ensure that you do not fixate on just getting the shot, to the exclusion of keeping close to, and an eye on your dive buddy and it is extremely important to realize that you can do tremendous damage to the ecosystem that you are trying to document. It only takes a single moment of inattentiveness when you are trying to jockey your position for that perfect shot, and you can easily blunder into the reef, destroying something that has taken decades or even hundreds of years to develop.

It is recommended that a person spend considerable time and effort to perfect your dive skills before attempting underwater photography. Your buoyancy control is key, and you have to be comfortable navigating tight nooks and crannies without bumping into coral heads or stirring up silt which can ruin your visibility (and the visibility of others). If doing night-diving, you have to be comfortable in that inky blackness, where the only light is what you and your dive-buddy provides.

If you remember only one thing, it should be to take only pictures, leave only bubbles, and move only yourself.

—

In late November, 2005, I was on a boat out of Nassau called the Aqua-Cat. If Blackbeards is camping at sea, the Aqua-Cat is staying at a 4 star resort that just happens to be on the water. At 105’ long, with a 30’ beam, it has the room to provide you all the creature comforts of home, and then some, and because of the catamaran construction, it is more stable in certain kinds of seas. I didn’t need any seasickness meds on this trip!

The amenities include private cabins (each with its own head), daily maid-service, a dedicated camera table, on-board slide film processing, and even Nitrox (Enhanced Air for diving, usually 32-36% oxygen).

One of the most spectacular dives of the trip is the shark dive, where they essentially tether a giant ‘chumcicle’ made up of frozen fish parts, to a rock in the middle of a natural underwater amphitheatre. You and the other divers jump in the water, and the first thing that you see when you look down are the long, distinct silhouettes of sharks as they cruise over the sand-flats below. This dive site is a popular one and the sharks have been acclimated over the years to gather at the sound of a boat’s engine.

Once all the divers have gathered around the rock being used as the anchor-point for the shark-feed, a divemaster swims down to the rock with a line, threads it through a metal-eye drilled into the rock’s surface, and then pulls down the chumcicle. A feeding frenzy ensues, with twenty to thirty sharks all rushing to the chumcicle to rip off bits to eat. Goliath grouper, Jacks, and other sport fish dart in to pick off little floating bits. For a photographer, there are few other photo-ops that have the excitement and adrenaline that a shark-dive has. You find yourself breathing quickly as you snap off shot after shot, trying to find the perfect one as the sharks swirl in around and between your fellow divers as they move into the centre to feed.

Thankfully, these sharks are not man-eaters, or we could all be called crazy people with some justification. These are for the most part, Caribbean Reef Sharks, and while you have to treat them with respect, they are mostly quite safe to dive with. Like a dog, they will bite you if you were to reach out and grab their tail, but looks notwithstanding, they are mostly peaceful, curious creatures. Do not touch the shark, and the shark will… probably, not touch you.

If you are doing a shark-dive, it may make sense to turn away from the scrum, and try and photograph sharks as they start to make their run into the feeding area. This way you will be able to isolate the shark, and not have to worry about diver’s bubbles or any little bits of fish being in the picture. Wide-angle works best for this, and again you would try to shoot a little from below.

Scuba diving is not a leisure activity for everyone, but for those people that try it, and like it, they tend to be passionate divers for their entire lives. If you are interested in becoming a certified scuba diver, I recommend that you do some more research or head down to your local dive-shop and talk about your interest with a professional.

Adding a camera to the fun and excitement that is diving is a natural extension of your desire to share the wonders and beauty that can be found beneath the surface, be it in the tropics or locally, in the Great Lakes. Some of the best shipwrecks in the world to dive on are located within a few hours drive of Toronto.

In the end, like any other photographic activity, you are going to get out of it what you bring to it and a healthy respect of the beauty, diversity and challenges that await you is the first step. In the end, it’s up to you to make every dive an adventure!

See you in the pool.