PHOTO TIPS FOR PALAU DIVING

by Kevin Davidson

How many of you have gone wreck diving and tried to take a few pictures only to be amazed at how much silt and sediment is in your photo?

In working on board the Truk Aggressor for two and a half years as Photo Pro and Captain, I have developed a few technics that you can apply to shipwrecks anywhere.

The nice thing about the wrecks of Truk Lagoon is that they offer several types of photography. Beautiful marine life grows in abundance on the exterior of the ship. The interiors, where the marine life does not flourish as well due to the lack of sun light and water movement, still prove to be great photo subjects. You still get the feeling of being on board a ship with it's great superstructures still intact.

Wreck diving and penetration are indeed advanced diving skills. Going inside these hulls to take photos requires even more advanced diving technics. The key word is bouyancy. Proper bouyancy and controlled breathing will be a key factor in determining how clear your pictures will be. The interiors of wrecks, wooden walls, and other building materials decay and settle to the bottom mixing with sand to create a fine silt that takes a long time to settle once stirred up. Unfortunatley the best way to get a good interior shot is to be first inside and we know that is not always possible. However, even with a moderate amount of silt in the water, proper strobe placement will still give you a very clear picture.

Photographers have a tendancy to point stobes directly at the subject. This will cause more particulate matter to be lit in your pictures. Strobes put out an arc of light, not a shaft of light. By pointing your strobe outward or slightly away from the subject your photo will be hilighted more by the edge of the stobes arc of light and will light up less reflective matter in front of the lens. A good illustration of this can be found in Jim Church's Nikonos V Handbook.

When working with wreck interiors, there are two ways two ways to show the erie feeling of the inside of these great hulks beneath the ocean. They are of course strobe lit or natural light. Make sure with a strobe lit shot that you are not trying to cover to much area with your strobe, don't try to light up an entire room. True...somtimes you can accomplish this if the room is small enough, but otherwise just choose portions of the interior, know the limits of your own strobe or strobes. Using two dosen't neccesarily constitute a better picture. If you know the limits of your own personal camera set up, it will keep you from taking pictures you know won't come out clearly anyway.

If the interior shot has any kind of ambient or natural light coming in through windows, port holes, sky lights, or just deteriorated openings in the ship itself then it's better to use no strobe. After countless picture taking and slide shows, more people seem to agree that the natrual light picture gives more of a feeling of being inside the wreck because more area can be seen with natural light, with your strobe turned off you have more shutter speeds to work with. You can then concentrate on just balancing the natural light of your picture. When using a strobe along with natural light in a picture, divers tend to come up with dark backgrounds and backscatter lit fore grounds.

With strobe turned off point your camera out towards the subject (pilot houses and structures on deck work very well with this since there are usually more openings allowing in more light). With the camera set on auto, check the view finder for a shutter speed value, if it shows that you need more light open your f-stop to allow maximum light even with shutter speeds slower than 30/sec you can still hold your camera still long enough to snap the shutter. Somthing I have done numerous times is to brace the camera against something or on the wreck itself, to avoid shake. It's better than using a tripod. If you can see the streams of light penetrating inside you can usually capture it on film with a little patience. Another trick for natural light is to raise the film speed or asa dial. By increasing your ASA dial on the camera your photo will show more detail even though the picture might appear to be under exposed. Example: when using 100 ASA increase it to 150 and 200 thereby achieving different type of lighting from the same subject. Outside on deck you can use combinations more succesfully depending on the clarity of the water.

In general, any film will work for the picture but I've grown fond of Ektachrome 100x or 64x and of course, Kodachrome. They tend to show more of the natural look found inside wrecks. On the outside, where the marine life is more abundant and more colorful, my personal favorite is Fujichrome.

Most wreck shots work best with a wide angle lens. I say this because most divers wish to get a nice shot of a wreck and to take in such a scene a wide angle lens is the choice. The camera set up I use most often is a Nikonos V and two SB103 strobes. Wide angle lenses allow you to shoot the scenic overall picture of a wreck at the same time you can get very close to single artifacts that might be laying about on the ship.

Whether if you have a housing or Nikonos, the lens of choice is wide angle. Choose the lens accordingly to your budget, but also know the limits of your camera, lens and strobe. Don't bite off more than you can chew with your photographs.

The last thing to stress is to keep in mind that this magnificent wreck is now home to a large host of marine life and referring back to proper bouyancy will help you treat the wreck with respect. It is in fact a living reef now and we want to be able to return to these sites and continue to photograph all the beautiful marine life found here.

To sum up:

• Practice your bouyncy before picking up a camera. When taking a camera down with you it becomes part of your weighting, so adjust accordingly
  
• Point your strobes outward to avoid back scatter.
  
• Decide ahead of time if the shot is going to be natural or strobe lit. Determe if there is enough ambient light or if the area is to large to cover with strobes. In the case of a strobe lit picture, know the limits of the lens and strobe of your own system. Other photography teachers can offer advice from there own experience but now one knows your camera rig better than yourself
  
• The lens dejour is wide angle. It's the best way to capture the scene of a wreck. Buy what you can afford and learn the limits of that lens...don't shoot more than the lens can see. Closer is always better with underwater photography and when getting close to wrecks wide angle is better.
  
• Finally, treat the wrecks with respect, they are now are home to new inhabitants. Hopefully with growing concern for reef ecology we will carry this over when wreck diving, they are also living reefs too.