I'm very excited to be able to share this months SNAP with you all! Something a bit different this month as we begin to explore a different world...an underwater world!
Living and working right on the Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia has really allowed me to take some time to appreciate the absolutely stunning underwater environment here.
After only a short amount of time here snorkelling I was itching to get into the water with my camera.
I spent some time researching various options for underwater camera housings for my current camera setup. However as you might imagine things can get very expensive very quickly. For this reason I ended up buying a compact camera with housing and fisheye wet lens (Sony RX100 V, Fantasea underwater housing, wide angle wet lens UWL-400Q).
After my first snorkel on the reef at Coral Bay I was in my element, what a truely beautiful natural environment this is.
The next day I headed out to a popular snorkelling spot called Five Fingers which is a section of the Ningaloo Reef just south from Coral Bay. Within the first 5 minutes of being in the water we had seen a beautiful reef shark, some squid and an abundance of different coloured fish hiding amongst the coral.
As we headed out further from the shore we were lucky enough to see a few turtles pass us by but unfortunately most of them were not looking for someone to have a swim with!
Later on we explored a large bommie closer to the edge of the reef. A camouflaged carpet shark watched us swim by as we followed the edge of the bommie round.
Just round the corner a sea turtle popped its head out from the reef. We expected him to quickly swim away but to our surprise he swam up to us and circled us for a few minutes allowing me to take some shots of him! What an absolute treat this was!
I really cant wait to explore the Ningaloo more and see what other amazing marine life I can capture too. This week I also gained my PADI Open Water scuba diving certification so lots more UW adventures still to come!!
Tips & Tricks:
The first thing to consider when shooting underwater is your camera and setup. These days there are so many options out there that it can be a bit of a minefield deciding. However I would highly recommend using a wide angle fisheye lens. This corrects the distortion you get from being underwater while allowing you to get more in your shot.
For my situation I was shooting only a few meters below the surface on a day with good visibility so the lowest possible ISO of 100 was used to reduce noise as much as possible.
Shutter speed is something to consider depending on what marine life or landscape you are planning on snapping. For small fast moving fish a higher shutter speed may be more beneficial but for my situation this awesome sea turtle was very chilled and moving slow and gracefully so I didn't need a shutter speed of any faster than 1/400".
Post editing your shots is also really important. One of the main reasons for this is that you will generally lose a fair bit of the colour underwater due to water absorbing different wavelengths of light at different degrees. So to stop all of your shots just looking greeny blue you will need to 'bring those colours back' during your editing process through colour correction. If you are able to shoot in RAW rather than jepg then this is going to allow for greater improvements during this editing process.
Any questions about camera/housing setups or post editing of images please do drop me a message and I would be happy to discuss this with you or help where I can. I hope you enjoyed hearing a bit more about this SNAP. Thanks again for reading and for all the amazing support people have given me to date.