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What makes a great underwater photograph? You aim for good white balance, sharp contrast and clear detail, but you want to avoid bubbles, distortion and, most of all, getting your equipment wet.
There’s not a lot of room for error when you’re submerging your expensive camera in a pool of water, so the question is this: If you can’t afford pricey underwater housing, how can you get your shot and keep your equipment dry?
Joe Tamborello from The Journal-Standard (Freeport, Ill.) has an answer: Use a fish tank.
“It's an old photographer's trick,” Tamborello says. “If you don't have an underwater camera housing this technique works very well in controlled environments like sports features and portraits.”
Tamborello purchased an old 20-gallon fish tank at a local garage sale for $10. “I talked them down from $15,” he says. “I shoot a swimming feature photo once, maybe twice, per year. So a full underwater housing wasn't really necessary. This does the job.”
“I place a DSLR body with a nice, open lens (f2.8 or wider) in the tank on a towel," he continues. "The towel just brings the lens up above the bottom black molding to the start of the glass. I prefer a wide angle. It gives you a little bit of cropping room, which is good since you're not able to look through the viewfinder while shooting. In the case of the five girls I used a 14mm f2.8 lens.
I set the camera to be overexposed by +1. The water takes away about a stop to a stop and a half of exposure.”
Once he’s set up, he still needs some help. To get the top photograph, he recruited two sophomore members of the swim team to jump into the pool and hold the fish tank ¾ of the way underwater. Then, “with the bottom 75% of the tank submerged, I knelt pool-side, reached my arms into the tank, and pressed the shutter.”
And that’s it – unique feature photography for only $10 (and some help from the girls on the swim team).
Have a photography tip or topic you’d like to see featured in this blog? Send ideas to araih@corp.gatehousemedia.com, or leave your comments below.
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