First things first in underwater photography

Hello everyone. Thanks for visiting my site. This is my first ever blog so please be easy on me!!

I started scuba diving 20 years ago, and quickly became a fanatic. Underwater photography came right afterwards. I loved diving and also taking photos underwater. I still remember when my first ever shots were developed (There was no digital technology by then, we had to use slides) I could not believe that there were real images with colour and definite shape of a fish. I was proud. Wow!! I took photos under water and they came out. It was unbelievable!

Looking at those photos now I am totally embarrassed. They look awful. Little I knew about the rule of thirds, nor the diagonals or negative space. Every photo had one common theme – a cacophony!! But I was oblivious of it by then.

One day while I was doing some shopping for scuba gear at Ocean Leisure they mentioned about some underwater photography courses with Martin Edge. I called Martin right away and arranged a one to one tuition in a pool. I was not aware that Martin was a big name in underwater photography, having published four awesome books with valuable tutorials in them. www.edgeunderwaterphotography.com

Martin went thorough a 4-hour classroom session with me and this was followed by a session in the pool taking photos of fake silk flowers. There, I learnt the concept of imagination; how you can take a mundane object and turn it into something extraordinary, reduce the column of water between the lens and the object and look up, not down. Get to the eye level with your object. But the biggest lesson for me that day was to learn about Negative Space. This changed my life and the way I look at things when I shoot. In the following years, I did many trips with Martin to various destinations: Red Sea, Maldives, Indonesia, and Caribbean etc. In each trip I learnt something new.

The problem was that with a busy working life and a family, I could only do one diving trip a year. So in that week I would do 50 dives, learn a lot about my camera and the housing and new techniques. But as soon as I came back, I would throw the camera to one corner and go back to work. I would forget everything I learnt on that trip. The following year on a new destination, I would start all over again. I had to do something else. With only underwater photography, there were only so many opportunities in a year. With that, I started land photography and especially shooting horses.  My first ever trip was with Jonathan Critchley www.jonathanchritchley.com to Camargue in Southern France to shoot the famous wild white horses of the Camargue. I was fascinated with what I have seen and this also quickly turned into another passion for me. I love the beauty, power and the majesty of the horses not to mention their healing power.

I hope I could explain the reason behind the two distinct areas of interest for me, Horses and Underwater  – Hence the name Equus and Aqua. Hopefully you will see many more examples of both in the coming days. 

This is an example of bad lighting, very poor technique, where the tiles of pool are visible, there is a lot of backscatter.

That day in the pool, I learnt how to turn the above conditions in to this. Taken with the same equipment, same conditions, same lighting, but the emphasis is on the flower and there is negative space which is the black background.