Before The Turn

Throughout the northeast, this is the best time of year to be freshwater diving. The water’s still warm. The life is still active. And most of the boaters and jet skiers have moved on.  

I wouldn’t want to spend too much time diving fresh – there’s just not enough diversity. But as a change of pace, it’s wonderful. The water’s soft, the fish curious, the wrecks easy, and the post-dive clean-up's a snap.

It’ll only last a short time, though. Soon, the water will chill, the turtles will bury themselves, and the fish will go torpid. Then the turnover – the colder water near the surface will drop to the bottom, and for a week or so afterward, viz will suck. And then it’s just a matter of time before we’ll be using chainsaws to cut through the ice. 

So, my advice: for the next month or so, take advantage. 

Under The Night Sky

Over the past few months, I've barely made a single dive that wasn't at night. So when the night dive Andy Martinez and I were going to make got switched to a day dive, I thought the sun was going to burn my eyes out. To quote Kramer, my rods and cones were all screwed up!

I love being underwater at night. What I love even more, though, is kicking back afterward at the waters's edge with whoever I dove with and a couple of cold ones. There just isn't a more beautiful place to be.

Re-Framing

Not long ago, a childhood friend and I were talking about the old days and she remembered her brother blasting The Doors on his stereo. When she’d complain, he’d tell her that he was “feeling the freedom.”

No doubt about it, feeling the freedom's a great thing, no matter what you’re doing. But as a photographer, and in particular, an underwater photographer, I’m not sure you can feel the freedom unless you’re comfortable taking shots that don’t necessarily look like what you're seeing. One of the easiest ways to do this is to shoot only part of an animal. And I don’t mean shooting just its head or its face. I mean framing or cropping the shot in such a way that people looking at it won’t see enough of the animal to necessarily know what it looks like -- or even what it is. But they’ll see enough to focus on whatever it is you want them to focus on.

Take the squid shot below. It's a pretty standard shot. It shows all of the squid and I like it.

The two shots below, though, are definitely different: they cut off the ends of the squids’ tentacles. By most of the rules of composition, this is a no-no. Someone who doesn’t know what a squid looks like will only be able to fill in some of the blanks. And that’s okay. My purpose here isn't to show you what a squid looks like but to focus your attention on their eyes and their chromatophores (the groups of pigment cells beneath their skin). This isn't what I saw when I looked at the squid but it's what I want you to see when you look at the shot.

The same can be said of the two nudibranch photos below. The first shows you the entire nudibranch and could be used to ID the species (Flabellina verrilli, in case you're wondering). The second won’t help you much in that regard. There are two nudibranchs in it and some people might not even be able to figure out where one ends and the other begins. Also, I’ve cut off the ends of the cerata (the finger-like structures) of the bottom nudibranch. 

Again, by most rules of composition, the second shot shouldn’t work. But it does – at least for me. When I look at it, I can feel the movement of the two nudibranchs across each other. I can focus in on the crimson tracts inside the cerata. And I hope you can, too. Obviously, I could have backed up and included both nudibranchs fully in the shot -- and, to be honest, I did. But those shots lost the impact of being so close.

A more extreme example is the shot below of a common sea star. And it would have been possible to move in even closer than this. 

Now, when you take shots like this, cutting off animals in unusual ways, you have to do it in a way that everyone knows you did it on purpose – that you didn’t just take a bad shot. You have to know what it is you want people to focus on, and then frame the shot so that they will.   

So the next time you're underwater photographing a fish or some invert, feeling the need to frame it just so to get that perfect head portrait, or to fit all of it in the shot, try something different: pick out the most interesting part, move in close and shoot just that bit. And feel the freedom.