8 Amazing Destinations to Build Your Underwater Photography Portfolio

02/08/2017 - 0 Kommentare

You’ve got a camera, a housing, and a week’s worth of vacation. All that’s left is taking the photos. We asked four world-renowned underwater photographers to recommend their favorite destinations for building your underwater photography portfolio and tips on how to get the perfect shot. From North Carolina to Australia, these eight scuba diving destinations are guaranteed to provide both excellent diving and opportunities to shoot photos that will impress your friends. Meet the Authors

Little Cayman

Bathed in clear waters, Little Cayman offers perfect conditions for stunning underwater images. Bloody Bay Wall dominates the underwater experience — all of the sites along this world-famous wall provide fantastic conditions for photographing scenery, as well as lots of friendly creatures to work into photos. Many sites have resident Nassau groupers as well as an abundance of hawksbill turtles and sharks. At Randy’s Gazebo look for giant barrel sponges, orange elephant-ear sponges or burgundy deepwater sea fans as a basis for your compositions. At the Great Wall, the coral precipice is so sheer, it’s foreboding, like the ramparts of some ancient fortress. Finding macro critters is about knowing where they live: Search wire corals for symbiotic shrimps and in the holes of touchme- not sponges for secretive white-foot shrimp. — Alex Mustard

Photo Tips

Always think foreground and background, so if you see a grouper posing, think about what to frame it against.

Cameras are usually more comfortable to hold horizontally, but walls like Bloody Bay Wall usually photograph best as verticals.

Don’t swim straight at turtles; instead, take your time to close the gap by swimming parallel. Turn down your strobes too, as turtles are more reflective than many other underwater subjects.

( Live it )

Multiple operators Dive Little Cayman, Cayman Brac or Grand Cayman with a variety of PADI operators found here: caymanislands.ky/divecayman

Lembeh Strait

If there were an Olympic event for macro photography, it would be held in Lembeh Strait. This stretch of water brims with weird and wonderful creatures that live on the volcanic sands that carpet the strait. Each dive becomes a mini safari looking for cryptic creatures and watching for odd behavior.

Hairball has always been home to the strangest of Lembeh’s oddballs. The site is flat, featureless and uninspiring until you look close, and then closer still. The dull gray sands hide an incredible cast, and is especially productive at dusk and dark when stargazers peer at you with a facemask perfect for bizarre and scary portraits. Though the hairy denizens offer great ID shots, behavior is particularly good at Hairball. Flamboyant cuttlefish hunt, flash, mate and, if you’re really lucky, you might finds eggs about to hatch. Octopus fight and use flip-flops, coconut shells and pot lids for cover.

Nudi Falls is our go-to site for gaudily colored nudibranchs. It is also a prime spot to capture nudibranch behavior, with predation and reproduction on view almost every dive.

What’s best about Lembeh Strait is that whether you’re a diver or a photographer, it’s a dynamic piece of water that changes from year to year and season to season. What you see on one day isn’t what you’ll see the next, so you have to keep coming back for more.
— David Doubilet and Jenn Hayes

**Photo Tips Because many of the animals in Lembeh Strait are small and camouflaged, your images will only be as good as the animals you can find. Get a good guide and let him guide, finding the weird and weirder for you to photograph.

The volcanic sand in Lembeh is not your friend. Check,
double-check and triple-check your O-rings before you jump in.

Carry a 60mm as your workhorse lens (it’s especially good for nudibranchs), and a 105mm for the very small, like photographing cuttlefish eggs or hitchhikers on nudibranchs.

( Live It )

Nad-lembeh Explore the glorious muck of the Lembeh Strait and sleep in beachside bungalows. nad-lembeh.com

British Columbia, Canada

The cool waters of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island hold a surprising secret: hot colors and unique critters rivaling top tropical destinations. If your photo library lacks a giant octopus, wolf eels, or super-size sea stars, don a drysuit and load your camera with a high-capacity memory card. Browning Pass is the epitome of a sheer, current-swept wall carpeted in a riot of rainbow sponges, anemones and soft corals. Macro is always very productive, from the surface to the century mark. Visually peel through the layers of life to find exotic oddballs such as grunt sculpins, decorated warbonnets and juvenile king crabs. — Brandon Cole

Photo Tips With an overabundance of cryptic subjects, swim slowly, allowing yourself to search more carefully.

To personalize portraits, get down on the fish’s level, focus on the eye(s), and separate your subject from the background by minimizing the depth of field and/or composing with contrasting colors in the negative space.

Reclusive giant Pacific octopus can sometimes be lured from their rocky dens with a crab-snack offering.

( Live It )
Browning pass hideaway dive resort Dive remote Browning Pass with this Port Hardy, British Columbia, dive shop. vancouverislanddive.com

Great Barrier Reef

We think of the Great Barrier Reef as a submerged coral nation and a great visual destination for all things coral: macro creatures, large animals, seascapes and the best shipwreck dive on the planet.

The SS Yongala is a steel passenger steamer that sank in 1911. While it’s not officially on the GBR, it is one of the GBR’s best sites, and the best wreck in the world in terms of abundance and layers of life. This artificial reef is bursting with wide-angle opportunities: groupers suspended in black-coral trees, sleeping loggerhead turtles surrounded by glassy sweepers, dozens of sea snakes and an occasional stack of stingrays.

The northern Great Barrier Reef is accessed by live-aboards out of Cairns and Port Douglas. The most famous dive is Cod Hole, where more than a dozen friendly potato cod (grouper) provide hours of opportunity for humorous portraits and fantastic images of cleaning behavior. — DD/JH

Photo Tips The Great Barrier Reef is a big area with big surprises, so expect the unexpected. We located a dead sperm whale with six tiger sharks feeding on it. You’ll never know what will turn up.

Commit at least two to three days to photographing the Yongala (whether that’s by day boat or on a live-aboard is up to you), and use a wide-angle zoom lens.

At Cod Hole, include at least one shot with a model and the photogenic potato cod. They’re comfortable enough around divers, and it will provide a good sense of scale for your diving and nondiving friends.

( Live It ) Mike Ball Dive Dxpeditions This PADI Five Star operator offers three-, four- and seven-day GBR live-aboard trips. mikeball.com

La Paz, Mexico

Tucked on the inner coast of Baja California, this resort town is an excellent and easy place to get a taste for big-animal diving. California sea lions are the stars of the show; although they are in residence year-round, the best time is mid-September through mid-November, when the new pups make their first unsupervised dives, and are at their most mischievous, curious and cute.

The main site for sea lions is Los Islotes, a group of small, rocky islands, but you will see the playful mammals on many of the popular sites. Many sites also have big schools of fish, and keep an eye out for predators like sharks and diving birds. There is also dense coral growth in places, which harbors an interesting range of species. Hawkfish are great posers, morays are plentiful and macro-fiends should keep an eye out for the endemic tube blennies, including the beautiful signal blenny displaying its saillike dorsal fin.

Finally, La Paz Bay is a feeding area for young whale sharks. If lucky, you might manage a dozen encounters in just an hour. — AM

Photo Tips The shallow water around Los Islotes can be full of particles, so try shooting some sea lions without flash. Use a fast shutter speed to freeze their acrobatic movements.

Make sea-lion photos more interesting by focusing on behavior. Direct your attention on the pups playing with toys, like starfish, interacting with each other or swimming through the schools of fish.

Tube blennies are smaller than people expect, so take an additional close-up lens so you can fill the frame with their cheeky expressions.

( Live It ) Fun Baja Choose either single day or overnight dive trips in stunning Baja California Sur.
funbaja.com

Bahamas

When it’s time to add big animals to your portfolio, the Bahamas is a can’t-miss destination. Clear water, experienced operators, and easy accessibility for most North American divers mean a phenomenal photographic experience.

White Sand Ridge has been delivering superb wild-dolphin encounters for decades. Pods of Atlantic spotted dolphins, and smaller groups of bottlenose roam over an expansive, shallow sand bank north of Grand Bahama Island.

Tiger Beach is mecca for shark photographers, home to bouncing-off-the-camera close encounters with tigers and toothy lemons. Divers cover up in neoprene from head to toe and follow strict safety protocols, kneeling on the sand in 10 to 20 feet for an adrenalin overload and once-in-a-lifetime toothy photo op. If Tiger Beach is too much of a rush, you can’t go wrong with Grand Bahama’s Shark Arena, where dozens of Caribbean reef sharks rush in for a controlled feed. The action is fast and furious, but you’re virtually guaranteed a winning shark shot for your portfolio. — BC

Photo Tips

White Sand Ridge is fast action with ever-changing shooting directions, so select a fast shutter speed (at least 1/125 sec), auto metering, and swim like crazy!

Interacting with dolphins helps hold their interest, which keeps them in front of your camera. Don’t hide behind your viewfinder, immobile. Frisky dolphins quickly tire of boring swimmers.

When possible, shoot with the sun at your back at Tiger Beach or Shark Arena to achieve better blues in the water. Position your strobe(s) wide and to the side to minimize backscatter, as sand is often kicked up from the bottom. Shoot bursts with quick-recycling strobes, and use enough power to banish the cyan cast on the shark’s white face and chin, but without overexposing.

( Live It )

Stuart Cove’s Dive Bahamas PADI Five Star IDC Stuart Cove’s in Nassau offers a number of shark dives. stuartcove.com

North Carolina

The Graveyard of the Atlantic is a shipwreck-rich stretch of ocean off the coast of North Carolina, with pirate ships and World War II German U-boats, submarines and purpose-sunk artificial reefs. This coastal area of the Atlantic provides world-class wreck diving and photography combined with a unique big-animal opportunity.

A former U.S. Coast Guard buoy tender, Spar is an intact wreck purpose- sunk in 1997. Divers penetrating the living clouds of baitfish will also encounter toothy sand tiger sharks swimming lazily through the wreck as if they own it.

The German U-boat U-352 is a short boat ride away, and a rare opportunity to see a piece of maritime history. We’ve descended on U-352 when it was shrouded in baitfish from end to end. The submarine is a unique subject for wide-angle photography and projects like panoramic imagery. — DD/JH

Photo Tips

Spar is a superb site to work with models and experiment with lighting. An extra well-placed strobe triggered by slave lights can brighten up the wreck’s photogenic bridge.

Hit Spar amidships and head toward the forward deck to check for the greatest numbers of toothy sand-tiger sharks.

There are several shipwrecks carpeting the bottom between Morehead City and Hatteras. Plan for more than a few days in the area, and be sure to include in that a “weather day,” since the weather can be unpredictable.

( Live It )

Olympus Dive Center Try this PADI Five Star Dive Center in Morehead City, N.C., for wreck-diving trips. olympusdiving.com

Maldives

This 500-mile-long, double chain of atolls, reefs and castaway islands north of the equator is a diver’s paradise. The entire country swarms with subject matter: rich reefs, fish, macro critters and big animals. However, while the dives are often spectacular, conditions can be unpredictable, which means as a photographer you have to be ready to think on your feet (or fins).

You can descend, planning to shoot macro, and be surrounded by a vortex of mantas in 200-foot visibility; or plan to shoot wide-angle reef shots and discover strong currents and murky green water. Sometimes in the Maldives, enjoying the ride has to come before the photos.

There are dozens of manta dives spread across the 26 atolls. Most sites are cleaning stations, where the rays come to the reef for their spa treatment. Great photos come with patience, and the less you move, the closer the rays will circle. If everyone in the group behaves, you’ll soon have them directly overhead.

In a few areas, like Hanifaru Bay, you can see mantas feeding, often in large numbers. In a spot like this, you could point your camera virtually anywhere and record something memorable. — AM

Photo Tips Dive with an idea of the types of photos you want — macro versus wide-angle — but be adaptable. Shoot what is exciting on the dive. A compact camera with interchangeable wet lenses is perfect for this.

The Maldives is very “fishy,” and there are chances for fish portraits on every site. Stay motionless and wait for the fish to turn toward you to capture its character.

If the visibility is poor when the big animals turn up, turn off your flash. Get below your subject and frame it against the sun — both turtles and mantas look great in silhouette.

( Live It ) Four Seasons Explorer Cruise the Maldives in style on the Four Seasons Explorer live-aboard. fourseasons.com/maldivesfse

Alex Mustard Dr. Alex Mustard has been a full-time underwater photographer since 2004. He has become one of the world’s top photographers, with dozens of annual trips to the Caribbean, Red Sea, and his native U.K. waters. amustard.com| |

Brandon Cole With a degree in marine biology from UCSB and experience in underwater scientific research, American Brandon Cole now explores and captures images from the planet’s last frontier: the world beneath the waves. brandoncole.com| |

David DoubiLet & Jennifer Hayes Arguably the planet’s most recognizable underwater photo team, this dynamic duo collaborates on story production, feature articles and books for National Geographic, Sport Diver and countless other magazines. daviddoubilet.com|

Asia And Indian Ocean