Thinking Digital in Underwater Photography

Digital photography is a new technology which requires learning new techniques and developing new habits. The first instinct of any film photographer is to simply apply the old ways of thinking to the new medium. This will ultimately prove frustrating. While you may reap the more obvious advantages of digital photography, you'll probably (unnecessarily) suffer from its perceived shortcomings, and ultimately you'll fail to benefit fully from the digital revolution.

There are three ways that digital photography fundamentally differs from film photography:

Immediate Review - Film needs to be developed. Even in this age of ubiquitous one-hour photo shops, you still must shoot and hope you've captured the moment. With a digital camera, you can instantly see your shot.

Zero Incremental Cost per Shot - Film costs money, roughly proportionally to the number of frames you shoot. While storage bits actually have some finite cost, they are so inexpensive as to be trivial. I archive all my shots on CD-R, which (today) costs roughly a nickel to save 100 6M pixel shots. If that's still significantly more than zero cost for you, consider deleting all but your best - at least then the "incremental" deleted shots are truly free. Use rechargeable batteries to make sure the incidental costs are also zero.

Flexible Processing - Custom prints are expensive, and darkroom work is slow. Photoshop (or similar programs) perform miracles on mediocre shots. You can trivially compensate for exposure errors, adjust color balance, and spot away backscatter. Some may call it cheating, but in reality it's just using good tools.

Shoot Now, Ask Questions Later - That's the basic rule in digital underwater photography. The constraints film rolls and processing delays have been blown away, and now there's no excuse not to take a picture. The more shots you take, the more keepers you'll collect. You're probably already using your equipment to optimize your bottom time as best you can. So the new techniques are based on the simple question: What can I do to allow me to take more pictures during my bottom time?

Maximize your Capacity - To the extent you can afford it, set up your camera to take advantage of free shots. Buy the biggest "digital film" memory module you can afford - two hundred shots is not too many. Use high capacity (1600 mAH) NiMH batteries, and plan to reload both memory module and batteries between dives. By doing so, you will never be limited by the capacity of your camera. You can shoot every opportunity.

Postpone Decisions - Don't delete photos underwater - the time required to distinguish keepers is too precious. Instead, use your generous capacity to allow you to make critical decisions topside.

Don't Bracket it, Try it - Generally, don't spend more than a few seconds determining your exposure settings and lighting arrangements. Instead, fire off a shot and check it out. You can judge overall exposure and lighting from the LCD in an instant. Then you can adjust accordingly and shoot again. Of course you can't always do this - if the subject will flee when the strobe fires, you need to be sure of your settings. Also, don't abandon the idea of bracketing exposures. The dynamic range of digital photos is limited, so you can't always compensate for inaccurate exposures later. Consequently, with many subjects taking a handful of shots at varying settings is worthwhile. But base those settings on what you see, not on calculations. Use that immediate feedback!

Post-Process - There's no need to use the fancy features of your digital camera. You can sepia tone or color enhance the shots topside. Even color balance is relatively unimportant - Photoshop's adjustments do basically the same thing in the same way as the camera's color balance processing. The object underwater is to grab as much quality raw image data as you can. You can refine it while degassing.

Get Creative - Some of our best shots (such as my son's self-portrait at left, which he took at 90 ft. in Fiji) have come from wild narked-out ideas that just occurred in the moment. Since film is free, why not? And since you can see the results immediately, you can quickly evolve new styles.