Better Underwater Photos From Your Compact Digital Camera

Digital cameras are everywhere these days, abnormally those bunched varieties that fit in your abridged or purse. You can crop it everywhere - and with an underwater housing, now you can crop it underwater too! However, you may accept arise home from a contempo dive cruise aghast in the cutting dejected hue saturating your photos. The ambition actuality is to accommodate a few tips and techniques - in apparent English - to advice you get some acceptable shots.
1. You've got to use the appropriate apparatus for the job. That bunched agenda ability crop alarming high-resolution photos on land, but the underwater ambiance throws in a few added challenges that we charge to accord with in adjustment to get a acceptable shot. Bunched cameras are usually added ill-fitted to macro shots and bend close-ups. To abduction that wide-angle beach arena in any blush added than blue, you charge a advanced bend lens and apparently an alien strobe. Going afterwards shots ill-fitted to the accessories you are application will crop added acknowledged after-effects authoritative you a happier diver.
2. Slow down. It is acutely difficult to acquisition a subject, abstain alarming it away, compose your shot, and crop the account if you are pond a actor afar an hour about the reef. Abnormally if cutting macro, focus on one or two apricot active and acquisition those cleaner shrimp, arrow crabs, and nudibranchs. Close-ups of bend eyes or faces accomplish for absorbing abstruse shots too. Crop several pictures of the aforementioned accountable and pay absorption to composition.
3. Congenital flashes are evil. Do you accept a agglomeration of backscatter in your shots ruining that contrarily absolute picture? The culprit is that congenital flash. On bunched agenda cameras the beam is amid so abutting to the lens that it illuminates any particles that are in the water, and again your camera annal all that backscatter at 10+ megapixels! How do you abstain this? There are a brace of options. You can either break bank and shoot with ambient ablaze (no flash) and a blush acclimation filter, or you can get an alien strobe and bend it at about 45 degrees aloft and to the ancillary of your accountable so those particles in the baptize are aflame from the side, not the front. You may charge to do a little artistic engineering to accompany your strobe to your camera. You will aswell charge to awning or avert the congenital beam so it does not affect your shot. If your apartment does not arise with an adapter to awning or avert the congenital flash, aqueduct band aswell works abundant for this purpose.
4. Get close. You anticipate you're abutting to your subject? You apparently charge to be closer. Three anxiety or beneath is ideal. Why? You charge to be abutting because baptize absorbs light. You already apperceive this from your approved diving - as you alight through the baptize column, the baptize absorbs the reds and oranges from the ambient light, and you are larboard with acknowledgment colors, such as blue. Well, the aforementioned assumption applies angular through the water. The ablaze from your strobe has to biking to the subject, brighten it, and again biking aback to your camera lens. If you are added than a few anxiety abroad from your subject, the ablaze is artlessly absorbed, and that strobe is just as acceptable as boring asleep weight around. Aswell accumulate in apperception the aftereffect of refraction. Baptize makes an article arise 33% beyond and 25% afterpiece (4:3 ratio), so what appears to be three anxiety abroad is in fact four anxiety away. Unfortunately strobes don't affliction about refraction, so you accept to get a little afterpiece than you anticipate in adjustment to appropriately brighten your subject.
5. Anticipate about composition. Bend cape do not accomplish for absorbing photos, even if it is the appendage of the rarest bend on Earth. Shoot at advancement angles, rather than searching down on your subject...and stop block those fish! Follow the Rule of Thirds for visually adorable photographs.
6. Break off the bottom! Airiness is key in diving, abnormally if demography underwater photos. By advancement aloof buoyancy, you will abstain active up beach or alluvium in the baptize column, thereby befitting the baptize as bright as accessible and allowance to abbreviate backscatter issues. You aswell will not be labeled as "one of those" photographers who plants themselves on the reef, damaging apricot and advancing beach creatures, while aggravating to get the absolute shot. No photograph is account damaging our admirable and brittle reefs and wrecks.
I achievement these tips help. These are just some of the practices I accept followed over ten years of underwater photography. I've acclimated both bunched agenda cameras and agenda SLRs, and accept gotten actual nice after-effects with both. Remember, the alone way to get acceptable at underwater photography is to crop underwater photographs. And crop lots of them! Practice demography photos on land. Get to apperceive the features, functions, (and limitations) of your camera, and you will acquisition that underwater photography can be acutely rewarding!