Wide-Angle Lighting Techniques
Wide-angle photography captures good color and resolution when underwater. But the optimal use of a wide-angle lens is dependent on placement. Read more about wide-angle underwater photography.

Wide-angle photography captures good color and resolution when underwater. But the optimal use of a wide-angle lens is dependent on placement. Read more about wide-angle underwater photography.
Turbid water can be a challenging environment for underwater photographers, particularly when shooting wide angle. Turbid water may not appear brown or green from the surface — in many cases the water looks entirely different once we drop in and begin the dive. All water is turbid to some degree. Understanding what causes turbidity and knowing how to work around it can make a world of difference when shooting in those conditions. One of the best skills a photographer can develop, particularly for shooting wide angle, is learning how to read water quality.
Kurt Amsler has been shooting underwater for nearly 60 starts — first using a converted soccer ball to house a camera. Learn more about his inspiration for photos and how he got into scuba diving.
Alex Mustard, Ph.D., is among the first prominent underwater photographers to come of age during the digital era. He’s a marine scientist.
Photo competitions can be great tools to assess your photography skills. Read more about how to find and enter into photo competitions.
As part of the 2018 Nature’s Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards annual competition, the Ocean Views category honors those photographers whose skill and creative vision have captured a frozen moment in time that can bring attention to both the bounty and fragility of the marine ecosystems found in and near our underwater world.
Old macro photography techniques made it hard to go beyond 1:1 ratios. New tools have made supermacro photography readily accessible. This makes it incredibly easy to capture tiny ocean critters in bigger-than-life images.
Digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) offer excellent video quality for the price and are a useful one-camera travel solution. But divers interested in shooting video should be aware of some compromises and challenges to motion-image capture that exist with DSLRs.
Underwater photographer Ernest H. Brooks II is a master in black-and-white photography. Read more about Brooks’ photography career and inspiration.