To capture powerful photos of schooling fish, it’s important to communicate their togetherness — that’s what schooling is all about. Unfortunately, the one thing guaranteed to mess up an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of schooling fish is a group of divers. As divers swim toward a school, the school will typically swim away, often in different directions, breaking up the photogenic piscine parade.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t want divers in the shot at all. The catch is that great baitballs of fish actually look most impressive when divers are included in the frame. People give the scene a sense of scale and are a great way to capture the excitement of diving in a situation in which there are more fish than water.

The trick to getting both is to be patient and clever. Fish schools naturally swim away from divers, especially the type of divers who race around at high speed. Use this knowledge to your advantage by positioning yourself on the opposite side of the school from the most energetic diver and staying still. The result: The fish will turn away from the disturbance and soon will be swimming straight to your lens.

Big Scenes
It’s no surprise that the grandest schooling pictures capture the biggest scenes. And although shooting without strobes is the easiest method, there are still ways to make strobes work in a big scene. First, minimize backscatter by using long strobe arms, then pull the strobes back a little so they are in line with the handles of your housing and make sure they are aimed forward so you don’t waste light.

A common problem with shooting big scenes while using strobes is that not enough light reaches the subject, leaving it looking blue. To make the most out of the strobe light relative to the ambient light, open up the aperture and quicken the shutter speed by the same amount. Then test your white balance. During processing you might find that you need to tweak the white-balance settings to restore the correct colors.

Keep Your Distance
Shooting schools requires unlearning one of the golden rules of underwater photography. Don’t get too close to your subject. This is harder than you might think. It takes patience and the discipline to hold a position and allow the good things to come to you. One way to master this is to understand the behavior of the fish.

Because fish tend to face into a current, the best spot for a photographer is upstream. If the current is running, you might need to work to get there, but keep your distance from the school as you swim to maintain their formation.

Once upstream, stop swimming and let the school slowly come to you. Whenever I am drifting toward a school of fish, a quote from the movie The Hunt for Red October always pops into my head: “Shut everything down and make like a hole in the water.”

Talk to the Animals
Most schooling fish like some space, but a few species, such as jacks, might actually be attracted to you. One trick is to take out your regulator and make a popping sound with your mouth. It works all around the world. I have used it on horse-eye jack in the Caribbean and bigeye trevally in the Pacific. In Egypt, there is even a school of giant trevally that can be attracted by swimming fast. When I spot them, I turn on my back and fin off as quickly as I can. Within a few seconds, the school of fish races toward me.

Schooling fish are easiest to approach when they are attracted to an underwater feature and don’t want to move. A classic example is silversides or minnows of the Atlantic and Caribbean that swarm inside wrecks and coral caverns in the summer months. These fish are reluctant to move out of your way, and provide amazing shots.