Underwater Photography

This is another project we’ve got underway, a couple of personal shoots but which will be suitable for an open call we’ve spotted.  Really though, this is us mainly undertaking a type of photography we can only really do once a year in the summer; underwater photography.

When we were at Uni, a classmate did a big underwater fashion shoot for their final major project, and me and Amy both discussed the fact that we’d always wanted to try doing underwater pictures of some sort. However the cost of the equipment put us off a bit; sealed digital underwater cameras are frighteningly pricey, plus we don’t have access to a swimming pool like our classmate did.  One summer in Wales though we did experiment with buying a disposable underwater film camera, but on the same trip found a sealable waterproof bag in an outdoor shop, that we reckoned would take my digital compact camera.  It wasn’t all that practical because the bag tended to interfere with the lens movement, but it did give us some nice images.  The next year, we found a rather more useful underwater camera bag which some clever person had designed with room for a camera lens, in a large projecting solid plastic cylinder.  This happily bought proper underwater digital photography within the realms of our low budget, so we got stuck-in taking pics.

The most recent underwater shots we did were a few in France- decent lighting and very clear water, which helped the camera a bit...

This is our usual location of choice though, Llanbedrog on the Llyn peninsular in Wales.  Nice sandy beach, National Trust car park (so free for us), incredibly calm and shallow sea, and on a nice sunny day, the water is gin-clear.  We’ve returned to this spot as a regular haunt for years now, and each year end up taking a few more underwater pictures. 

And this is the low-budget, low-tech Ribbon Art and Photography Maritime Photography Kit.  Consisting as it does of the original underwater camera bag (now useful for carrying spare batteries and memory cards; nothing more annoying than being 50 yards out from the beach and the batteries going), and the newer camera bag made with provision for a lens.  The two cameras are slightly older digital compacts, a Samsung (which is marginally newer and more advanced, but which doesn’t seem to cope well with certain kinds of underwater photos and lighting conditions), and a Fuji Finepix, which is a tad basic but copes magnificently with low lighting conditions.  We use these older cameras because there is always the risk of the bag failing, and we’d rather risk killing a 5 year old camera than our more modern Nikon compact. Finally, a large inflatable swim ring which we’ve been using as alternately a prop and a floating camera rig for about 4 years; its easier to float around taking pictures than trying to hold a camera still and focus whilst madly doggy-paddling around in the waves.

First up, Amys project.  Her intention was to try and capture a balance between surface and submerged, and dramatic shots of waves breaking, all from the perspective of somebody actually swimming, with their head just above water.  The waves in question are actually the most shallow ones right on the shoreline, but photographed close-up in a way that this is not always apparent.  We also visited another location, Criccieth, for some extra shots as the waves are a little more dramatic there.  Amy managed to get some very nice shots as she went along, and we’re hoping to get back here shortly to get a load more images with different backdrops and sky.  Interestingly, the newer camera (the Samsung) copes fantastically with this kind of shot, whereas it struggles a bit with full-on underwater.

Mine now… I was a bit unsure what to do for my own shoot; when I was in France I managed to get some nice pics in rockpools, but I haven’t found any really nice ones in this part of Wales yet, it all being sand and shingle.  Plus, the Samsung wasn’t really coping with trying to focus underwater in such tight confines, as the above shot demonstrates. I had wondered about doing some shots at night, weirdly-lit rockpools using coloured LED torches, but the camera was having enough trouble focusing in daylight.  So leaving the rock pool idea, I returned to a project I’ve been messing with for a few years.

Starting when I was at Uni, I have every now and again been doing work on a sprawling project called “Inflate-Deflate”, doing abstract shots using inflatable beach toys (more in this blog entry here http://ribbonartandphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/summer-toys-in-bleak-midwinter.html ). When we started doing the underwater pics, I took to trying a couple of shots from underwater, and now with slightly better kit available I thought I’d have another go (might as well; an effect of that project and my old Happygoth project is that we’ve still got tons of beachtoys in the props collection).  The aim of the pics was to get some very abstract close-ups, with weird lighting and reflections, and with some experimentation I seem to have finally hit on something I really like.

We did hit some problems though with the shoot, and whilst we don’t like to rant too much on here, I’ll mention them because it did affect the images somewhat.  First is the suspicion we seem to attract from some other people on the beach, who don’t seem happy to have people wandering round in the sea with cameras... it does tend to force us to try and find isolated spots for a bit of privacy, which suits us but makes things a little awkward.

Secondly, its dogs on beaches; most Welsh beaches don’t allow dogs, at least during season, but Llanbedrog allows them.  We’d have got more images shot had we not had people allowing their dogs off the lead to run riot on the beach around us… nothing for quite interrupting a shoot like irresponsible dog owners throwing (apparently on purpose) their dogs’ chew-toys into the water near us, on an otherwise near-deserted stretch of beach, and us finding two massive fighting Alsations in the sea about 10 yards away.  Quite apart from the beaches being covered in dog crap, seemingly every beach we tried in this area we attracted everything from suspicion to full-on anger from dog walkers, especially on morning shoots; on the Friday morning, a wave shoot for Amy at 8am near Llanbedrog was ‘guarded’ by an elderly dog walker who stood glowering and watching us from behind a hedge whilst we were on ‘his’ beach, before heading back to his car where he actually waited for us to leave, hanging out of his car and glaring at us furiously as we left.  We’ve had odd problems with dog walkers before on shoots (dogs running into shot, stealing props, trying to attack us or the models), but never as much as in the last couple of days on these two or three beaches.

Right, ranting over.  Hopefully we’ll be returning to Wales on my days off later next week, with the intention being to do/redo some of the “Home is…” shots, and also to complete some more underwater pictures now that we’ve both got the experimental shots out of the way.  Amy will be doing some more wave shots, maybe with rougher seas, and I’m aiming to do some more pictures with inflatables now that I’ve worked out which images work best, and also perhaps some shots with miniatures for an unrelated project, if I get chance.