A Glimpse Of Underwater Photography

Are you a diver? Have you ever thought of showing what you see underwater to your friends?  How does underwater photography work  anyway?

It was said that underwater photography started around 1800 when William Thompson took an underwater photograph with a camera mounted on a pole. But it was not until 1957 that underwater photography started to bloom when the first waterproof camera was invented.

As good as a waterproof camera may sound, underwater photographers nowadays generally use a casing to protect their camera so that they don’t need to have two cameras for land and underwater. Furthermore, these casings are usually made of plastic so they are light in weight and your wallet.

And to  make underwater photography more enjoyable , compact digital camera manufacturers nowadays are looking into the possibility of water resistant camera. Very soon, you will see cameras that have stronger water resistant capability and good for diving even without any casing.

The next underwater photography equipment you will need is an underwater flash unit. This is because as you dive deeper, you will start to see the loss of color in your surrounding hence the blue green color you often see underwater. A lobster will look dull and dark brown because the red and orange colors are absorbed by the water. So, an external light source is important to restore your subject’s color so that it will look more alive and real. One of the reasons for underwater photography is to amaze the viewer of the marvelous underwater world and you can’t do that with a boring picture.

Then, do you know that underwater photography is more than just about marine life? You can take pictures of the amazing cave system and some divers even become experts in underwater landscape photography. Who says landscape photography is only limited on land?

A very important tip about  underwater photography  is that you will want to learn to be good in diving before you take up this hobby. Not just that your diving skill will affect the quality of your pictures, your safety is also dependent on your diving technique. After all, you are the stranger in the sea and if you look at this from the marine’s eye, you are invading their territories and they have all the right to attack you.

The last underwater photography tip for you is that you will want to get as close to your subject as possible. This is again caused by the fact that water will absorb light and make your subject loss its true color. That is why you need to be a good diver so that you can stay calm when you are approaching your subjects without provoking them.

By: Michael Wong

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Any pointers on it? i head out next week on vacation and bout an underwater video camera which has low quality photos as well (Sanyo Xacti HD. 

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Wedding photography is an art that can be mastered with ample practice. Take a look at this  guide for wedding photography.

Wedding photography enjoys an important position amongst the various genres of photography. Photography, as a creative medium, has grown in leaps and bounds. From fashion photography to portrait photography, budding photographers can take their pick for a career choice that is closest to their personal preferences.

In the recent times, wedding photography has gone beyond the traditional close-ups and group photographs. With the increasing number of demands from the clienteles, wedding photographers now, have freedom of experimentation, which allows them to discover their creativity. So, what makes a good photograph? Well, the answer lies with the photographer itself! It is how a photographer perceives a subject and frames the visual into the most interesting angle, that is of utmost importance! Wedding photography requires a certain presence of mind from the photographer’s point of view and his/her ability to capture the action and special moments! With digital photography, things have only become easier! Here, we shall take a look at some important tips for wedding photography.

Wedding Photography Tips

Study the location
Whether you are a professional or a  beginner to photography , you must study the location of the wedding in advance. At times, there may be more than one location. Know how these locations will appear at different times of the day. You can even ask the couple to visit the location along with you for some test shots. This will give an indication about the final results.

Ensure you shoot with enough light
If it’s indoors, ensure there is enough natural light filtering through the windows and doors. In the outdoors, you need to think about harsh sunlight. Harsh sunlight is something that will definitely not flatter your photographs. It casts deep shadows on the subject, which gives a bad effect. Note the time of the event in advance. Photographs clicked in the evening light will give a soft look to the photographs.

Try variations in angles
Standing in one spot and clicking photographs will only give you boring results. Be a little bold and try various angles even if it means you would have to stand in various awkward positions! The key element is to capture the perfect angle and mood of the moment! You can try something different instead of the normal group photographs. Ask friends of the couples to experiment and get them to pose differently!

Help the couple feel at ease
As a wedding photographer, you should have a great vibing with the couple. On the wedding day, there are chances the couple may feel stressed or nervous and you must ensure they feel at ease. This will ultimately give you the best results in your pictures. Make the guests also feel comfortable to avoid getting staid shots. Beautifully framed photographs are assets to your portfolio.

Consider the background of the subject
In a wedding, there’s bound to chaos. You need to think about this in advance and anticipate the possibilities! This is one of the areas where you would need to rely on your presence of mind and decide what looks the best for your compositions. This is when your preparation in advance would help you to get better compositions. However, you would need to keep a sharp lookout for cluttered up spaces and areas, which do not have the required amount of light. You can even ask the subject to shift few steps to achieve the appropriate angle. A wide aperture setting can also help to blur backgrounds!

Always discuss with your clients about the kind of expectations they would have. This would help you to have a better idea to know how to go about the assignment. Experiment a little without fearing the results! After all, you never know when you would join the league of famous photographers!

By Kashmira Lad Published: 12/9/2008 Photography for weddings video and articles.

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Tip 1: Miss the eyes and you’ve missed the shot. Getting the eyes in focus is key to capturing a photo of an animal. It’s human nature to look at the eyes. It’s how we determine emotion and how we connect. When I was in Homer, Alaska, I came across a moose on the move. Given it was early morning and the light was low I knew getting a fast shutter speed to freeze his movement would be tough, so I quickly adjusted my camera to lock the focus on his eyes, and took the shot. The majority of the picture was a bit blurry, but because the eyes are in focus, the shot was saved.

Tip 2: Use a telephoto lens. Getting closer to the action, yet staying a safe distance, is the key to photographing wildlife. By keeping your distance you allow the animal to be in their comfort zone and are more likely to get natural behavior. Safety is also a factor when photographing in the wild. Always keep at least 100 yards distance from wildlife, for your safety and for the well being of the animals. Another good use for a telephoto lens is a trick not many people know, which comes in very handy when photographing animals in the zoo that are behind fencing. If you move close to the fence (keep a safe distance) and use at least 100mm of your telephoto lens, focusing beyond fence, with a wide aperture, you can “focus out” the fencing and take a photo of the subject with no wires! Now, there are some exceptions, such as, if the fencing is black you’ll have a much better chance of pulling this off. Regular chain link fence is gray and semi-reflective, which in the sunlight can cause a glare and is often too bright to focus out. I’ve also had some successes at trying different angles, so experiment for your best results. I often shoot with a Canon 100-400mm IS USM and a Canon 28-300mm IS USM. If you’re new to telephoto lenses, on a budget and not sure what to get, I suggest the Tamron 28-300mm or a Sigma 70-300mm. I’ve also had great results with the Sigma 50-500 which, as of this writing, I consider to be the best bang for the buck. These lenses all work with teleconverters of 1.4x and 2.0x so you can easily extend your reach even further, often while keeping auto-focus (with Canon L lenses, a minimum aperture of 4.0 or less will support auto-focus. Above that a manual focus is your only option.)

Tip 3: Shoot with two eyes. This is a tip I’m sharing here, but often have a hard time remembering myself. I can’t tell you how many shots I’ve missed because I didn’t see the action coming. By keeping both eyes open you’ll see the subject in the viewfinder and you’ll also see what’s going to happen next.

Tip 4: Adjust your shutter speed to stop/show the action. When animals are on the move you need to decide quickly on the type of shot you want to take. If you want to freeze the action, you’ll need to shoot at 1/500 or faster and depending on light, that can be tricky. One option, if you’re shooting digital, is to adjust up your ISO, which will make your sensor more sensitive to light and give you that needed boost in shutter speed. Now, if you want to give a sense of motion to your image, try shooting with a shutter speed of 1/4 to 1/8 and pan your camera with the animal. Pan steady and remember, keep the eye in focus if you can! For best results, pick backgrounds that are uncluttered and simple, as this will make the subject standout in the image.

Tip 5: Anticipate behavior. This tip goes well with Tip 3, shoot with both eyes, because anticipating behavior is often key to capturing a rare moment, action and unique situations. Panning the camera to follow an animal can be a tiring process, so often I’ll study the animal’s behaviors watching for a pattern and then use some anticipatory shooting, and a little luck, to hopefully capture that perfect moment.

Tip 6: Use a tripod. Using a tripod is one of the best things you can do to improve your photography, and wildlife is no different. By mounting your camera to a tripod you reduce camera shake, which is usually the cause of blurry photos. To take this a step further, I use a shutter release cable, which eliminates the need to touch the camera while snapping shots and thus removes almost all potential for camera shake.

Tip 7: Composition – Framing your shots. Some simple framing advise can go a long way toward improving an image, and for those who are computer savvy, a little trick called cropping (software technique to cut a photo) can help improve composition that wasn’t quite right at the time the photo was taken. The best way to think about composition is to picture a tic-tac-toe grid in the view finder of your camera (I’ve seen some new cameras that come with this as a feature you can turn on!) and use that grid to organize your shots. There is no hard rule, but the general theory behind good composition is that your subject lies in one of the crosshairs of the grid. Setting up your shot to lead the eye is also a good example of composition.

Tip 8: Use a wide aperture. Learning the effects of adjusting your camera’s aperture will go a long way toward improving your photographs, especially in portrait style shooting. In a photo of a grazing elk I shot in Yellowstone, I chose a very wide aperture to blur out a potentially busy background and bring attention to the subject instead. As you learn to control your camera you’ll also find that adjusting your aperture will have a direct effect on your shutter speed. This will prove especially helpful when shooting in the early mornings and late evenings, when animals are typically most active and the light is warm and muted.

Tip 9: Plan for the best light. There’s nothing like a cloudy day to provide soft, even light for wildlife photography. Clouds act like a giant diffuser to the sun, spreading the light out evenly and taking away harsh shadows that are created by a bright, sunny day. Of course, a cloudy day has its challenges as well, such as lower light, which will force you to adjust ISO and shutter speed settings for stopping action and getting sharp, in focus images.

Tip 10: Use a flash to fill in shadows. It may sound odd, but using a flash outside on a bright sunny day actually makes a lot of sense. In this situation, you’re not using the flash to illuminate the subject, as you would in a dark setting, but rather to fill in the shadows and provide detail where harsh shadows would otherwise be heavy and dark. It’s important to use flash wisely and here are a couple of other suggestions:
1. Be conscious of the animal and whether flash will scare them and,
2. There are times where your only shoot is through glass — using a flash behind glass will ruin your shot. The glass will reflect the light back at the camera and you shouldn’t be surprised if all you get is a big white picture!

Bonus Tip:  Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.  This tip is a no-brainer for those of us who shoot digital. Shooting digital is cheap — technology is advancing so quickly that, as of this writing, a 4 gigabyte memory card is selling for less than $100 and you can get A LOT of photos on a 4 gig memory card. The bottom line of this tip is take photos….a lot of photos. Don’t be shy. I often take multiple photos of the same scene or subject and then later choose the best from the group. This is also a great way to learn; by adjusting your camera between shots you can experiment and see the results of different settings of your camera. And, don’t sweat the details of trying to remember which photo had which settings…another great thing about shooting digital is something called EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format). EXIF data is written to every photo so that later, upon review, you can see every setting your camera used to take that image.

About the author
Stephen Oachs spends every chance he gets looking through the viewfinder of his cameras. He is an accomplished nature photographer with an impressive gallery of stunning wildlife shots. Visit his photo journal at www.stephenoachs.com. Read more about him at his blog, stephenoachsphotography.blogspot.com. When not taking photographs, Stephen’s day job is spent as technical director of VisiStat.com, a leading next generation Web Analytics service that specializes in real-time Website Performance Management.

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For today’s ever growing ranks of digital photographers however, it brings to mind thoughts of a stamp-sized memory card, a pocket hard drive, or CDs and DVDs. Welcome to the world of digital photography, which is fundamentally changing the way we capture and preserve images.

Digital photography today is a rapidly growing consumer pastime with many advantages versus traditional film-based cameras, including the ability to immediately review, erase, annotate or categorize images, speed and ease of operation, and quality at the high end of the digital photography scale. Although some film cameras can operate without batteries, minus the flash, most consumers are unconcerned with use in wet or poor weather environments and are drawn to digital cameras by all of the advantages that they offer.

Because of this, the entire photography industry is changing to embrace different consumer preferences, including a reduced desire for printed photos. The market for printed photos from film in the United States peaked in 2000 at over 30 billion, and then fell to under 26 billion by 2004. Initially, there were problems with quick-service photography shops ‘cropping’ digital images in order to force them to print properly on the same paper used by film cameras – as more and more people move to digital however, services and products emerge to make it easier to transfer your memories from electronic to tangible.

Some people feel that a picture just isn’t a picture if you can’t put it into a frame (although wireless, internet-enabled miniature LCD ‘picture frames’ ARE available) or store it in a photo album. But many of today’s young people are much more comfortable with technology than their parents and grandparents. It is not uncommon for a college student to feel more secure with electronic images than paper ones.

No one is certain whether digital photography will eventually reduce our demand for photo prints, but it is guaranteed that the way of the future in photography is digital. Additionally, there are far more snapshots being taken than ever before, due to the ease with which they can be reviewed and removed from digital cameras. So whether you’re partial to electronic or shoebox image storage, be ready for photos to get easier, better and cheaper in coming years – and of course, keep smiling.

By: Caitlin Moore

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