Seven tips for great images even when the water clarity is less than ideal.

Good visibility inspires smiles so broad they break mask seals, and back on board at the camera table, we photographers trade high-fives and shouts of "Amazing dive. The vis was 100 feet or more!" But in the real world, stellar visibility isn't guaranteed, and underwater photographers soon discover that some of the most interesting places to photograph are in nutrient-washed waters. After all, something needs to nourish those massive filter-feeding soft corals lining the wall; schooling, hungry fish don't choose a reef for the ocean view; and the world's best macro sites aren't called "muck" for nothing. Of course, sometimes it's more than nutrients degrading visibility. Heavy seas can stir the sand bottom, and currents can sometimes bring the outflow from a distant river too close to the reef. Whatever the reason, underwater photographers often find themselves shooting in less-than-ideal visibility. Employing the right tricks will vastly improve the odds of getting great shots.

Shrink the Water Column

The first and most obvious solution is to have less dirty water between the lens and the subject. Even in ultra-clear water, moving closer to the subject achieves better colors and greater resolution. Water is 600 times denser than air, and at its best, provides cyan color filtration. At its worst, this filter may be greenish-brown and full of particles--all the more reason to have less of it to deal with.

With a large subject, that means using a wide-angle lens to get as close as possible. A topside shooter could cover a subject as large as a person from 10 feet away with a 35mm lens, or from just three feet away with an 18mm lens. The underwater shooter doesn't enjoy the same latitude. The most effective underwater photography is done less than four feet from the subject, and with the crap-vis multiplier (get twice as close as you think), the magic distance is likely two feet or less.

In the photograph at the Warna Ember seamount in Raja Ampat, I knew from looking over the side of the boat that the visibility was poor. Not only that, it was heavily overcast. But the dive briefing told of all these majestic soft corals cloaking the substrate, so I decided to try to make it happen with the widest lens I had, a 15mm fisheye lens on a full frame Canon EOS-1Ds MKII. Once I got in the water I found the conditions even worse than I'd thought--probably no more than 20 feet of vis. My only solution was to get extremely close to the orange gorgonian, positioning myself just 10 inches away from the leading edge. This allowed the perspective to distort the image and make the large subject seem even larger. Then I motioned a nearby videographer to swim into the negative space at the upper-left corner of the composition. With the shot balanced in my mind's eye, I had to make the lighting happen.

Throwing the light from the traditional 45 degrees and above from my left-hand strobe would have illuminated the particles in the water column. Instead, I hand-held that strobe at 45 degrees and above, from the right side. A second strobe mounted on the right side of the housing illuminated the bottom part of the gorgonian. It also occurred to me that with the overcast conditions, the background water would appear extremely dark using a normal sync shutter speed like 1/125th, so I slowed it down to 1/30th of a second to open up the background.

The idea is to get the largest subject covered within the smallest amount of water. For fish portraits, sometimes something as simple as adding a dome port instead of a flat port can make all the difference. Imagine you are shooting a barracuda with a 60mm Micro-Nikkor and a flat port. To get a full-body shot of the fish you'd probably have to be four feet away. Now, same fish, same lens, but working behind a dome port, an equivalent composition could probably be achieved only three feet from the subject. This is because the dome port restores the lens' topside angle of view, while a flat port refracts and magnifies.

Angle of Light

One of the big problems with housed point-and-shoot cameras is that the only strobe illumination comes from the tiny strobe built into the camera, only inches away from the lens. That means the point of intersection of light and lens happens very near the front of the housing. Any particles in suspension are front-lit rather than rim-lit--like shooting through a constellation of full moons (front-lit) rather than an occasional quarter moon (side-lit). Shooting in turbid water requires very creative strobe placement, usually working from the standard 45-degree angle or wider, and fine-tuning as conditions require.

The dive light in the shot of the Ray of Hope wreck illuminates the particles in suspension, showing how very dirty the water was at the time. Typical of wreck photography, our exhaust bubbles had dislodged particles from the ceiling of the wreck, creating horrendous visibility. Yet using careful strobe placement, I minimized the backscatter visible on the wreck and diver.

Control the Foreground

In dirty water, a busy foreground is your friend. Shooting in open water with a lot of particulates almost guarantees backscatter, but if you can find a textured foreground to hide the particles, the success ratio will go way up.

Overall, this can diminish contrast in the shot, but a simple tweak with a saturation slider in Photoshop is a whole lot easier than an hour of painstaking backscatter cloning.

In dirty water, assume anything shot with open water as part of the composition will be problematic. Fill the frame with compositional elements that are visually confusing, busy and light in color. This will help obscure any particles that might be in suspension.

Consider the Ambient

Backscatter Avoidance 101 tells us that white particles against black or dark blue are a whole lot more obvious than when photographed against light-colored backgrounds. Look at the water background in these two lionfish shots taken in Papua New Guinea. I took both from the same distance with a strobe power of f-16. The difference is the one with the dark-blue background had a shutter speed of 1/200th second, while the lighter water comes from a shutter speed of 1/50th second. Most creative wide-angle shooters are keenly aware of the shutter speed as the controlling factor for the ambient light in their background, but I think fewer fish and macro shooters consider that shutter speed can have the same effect with their marine life portraits shot in low vis by letting ambient light obscure some of the backscatter.

One Strobe or Two?

Today, the trend seems to be moving toward "more light is better." Rarely do I see a digital SLR rig without dual strobes. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I almost always use two strobes myself for fish and macro subjects. But for wide-angle, I often like the convenience of a single hand-held strobe. I choose a wider, more powerful strobe for this application--something like an Ikelite 200, Sea and Sea YS250 or the Seacam Seaflash 150. This lets me decide where the light should fall in relation to the foreground--quickly, instinctively and without illuminating the open-water edges of the frame. After all, there's nothing in open water except backscatter, so keep the light away from that area as much as possible.

The "Hail Mary"--Go Macro

When all else fails, and the water is too turbid for wide-angle or even fish portraits, you can almost always find something to shoot with a macro lens. Some "muck" destinations such as North Sulawesi, Indonesia, provide very clear water and magnificent reef scenes as well, but any location can occasionally have water that is so turbid, macro is the only option. Of course, macro subjects can be so compelling you won't want to waste a single dive on wide-angle, but that's another story for another time.

When I took this shot of a Banggai cardinalfish at the house reef off Kungkungan Bay Resort, I was doing my safety stop at 15 feet. While the visibility had been decent in deeper water, the waves breaking along the shoreline reduced the vis in the shallows to less than 15 feet. The combination of close focus with a 100mm macro and a visually confusing foreground and background made this portrait of the cardinalfish possible.

Remove in Post-editing

Most photo-editing programs now have ways to remove offending bits of detritus in a photograph. Adobe Photoshop CS3 has the most options and creative tools for attacking evil distractions of this nature, but Adobe's Lightroom also has a quick tool for simple backscatter masking.

Not all backscatter can be eliminated at the moment of capture, and learning how to use your editing software is a necessary step in getting the most out of your photos. However, learning all the tricks to optimize photographic performance in the water--even with poor visibility--means less time at the computer later.