As we found out looking through the Red Bull Illume finalists, everyone loves an underwater shot, and Sarah Lee takes some nice photo’s under the waves in Hawaii, this interview on PetaPixel.com shows off some of her images and lets her explain a bit more about the process of getting them to come out nicely:
Link: http://petapixel.com/2013/07/22/photographing-surfers-underwater-how-sarah-lee-makes-it-happen/
Photo: Sarah Lee
I’m in the process of writing my first How To post on underwater photography, like my other How To’s it’s put together through trying it out, then reading up on it a bit and solving problems and fixing mistakes I made, then trying it again, and documenting the process so we can all learn to take better photo’s.
This interview serves a little more as inspiration than instruction and definitely features some amazing visuals, saying that my favourite part is the brief foray into the more technical aspects like this:
PP: How many shots would you say you take per shoot? How many from those would you be comfortable giving the “stamp of approval”, so to speak?
SL: It depends because you never know what you’re going to get! For underwater, I have about a 1:3 ratio on average. So if I took 300 shots, I would keep about 100 of them. I’m not one to run the shutter like a machine gun, but try get in position and capture 3-5 frames per wave. For under-wave photography I think that’s reasonable because there’s so much outside of your control, sometimes you just need to be in the right spot to capture what’s happening in front of you.
That ratio is pretty great, in my limited experience of taking photo’s underwater I have a much lower hit rate, I can understand the lack of rapid fire shooting underwater though as it’s all over quickly, you spend more time preparing for each wave and getting oriented underwater, whereas on the surface you can be paddling for position and pointing the camera at the same time. She mentions earlier in the interview that she’s using a Canon 7D, capable of 8 frames per second, so holding back to 3-5 frames per wave requires some will power.
Have a look at the interview, I’ll be back in a while with some of my own tips and experiences shooting underwater in the low-vis’ waters of Devon.
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