Tips for your underwater holyday photos

I’m a newbie underwater photographer, so if you googled or binged for tips and landed on this page, I’d advise you to think again and try the next hit. Hopefully google and bing won’t rank me high on the search list so I can write some rubbish about a subject I know so little about.

But I digress. Here are my tips:

• Use a flash. I didn’t, and I regret it.
• Always shoot on raw format, you’ll surely end up correcting your photos, and JPEG just kills most of the latitude you have. As Canon RAW drivers doesn’t support 64 bits, I didn’t, and I regret it.
• Always use goggles. I can’t focus and frame a picture under water without them.
• Choose a wide lens. First because water is a natural teleconverter. And above all because it facilitates focusing and framing, and boy this is hard to do under water – at least if you have so little experience as your blogger friend.
• On shallow waters avoid using high ISO. This pictures will need some post-processing, let’s us not make it unnecessary harder.
• update: Use internal focusing lenses. I’ve tried it with my video camera, an external focusing system, and the bag often kept the camera from focusing
• update: protect the flash hot shoe, it can damage the bag. I’m using my wife’s demakeup pads, but simple cotton will work just fine.

Here are some of these pictures (my laptop doesn’t have LightRoom installed, so the post-processing was… well… not too great…):