Perfect Buoyancy for Underwater Photographers

The perfect underwater picture needs perfect buoyancy. Great underwater photographers have mastered buoyancy and propulsion since taking good shots without hurting yourself or your environment without perfect buoyancy is virtually impossible. So read on to find out how underwater photographers achieve buoyancy perfection!

Practice Shallow for the Best Results

To perfect your buoyancy, you will need to follow the tried, and tested mantra of “practice makes perfect.” Fortunately, you don’t have to head too far out to do this; in fact, you can develop stunning buoyancy skills in your swimming pool. When it comes to perfecting buoyancy, the shallower, the better since buoyancy in the shallows is more challenging! If you have perfect buoyancy in 1.5m/5ft of water, you will have exceptional buoyancy everywhere else.

Why practice shallow, you ask?

It's all to do with pressure and volume, including the basic laws of physics affecting diving you learned on your open water course. If you are at a depth of 20m/~66ft, you are at a pressure of 3bar/Ata. If you ascend 2m/~3ft to 19m/~60ft, your pressure drops to 2.8bar/ata. That works out as a 7% reduction in pressure, which means that the air in your BCD and lungs will expand by 7% and thus will have a smaller impact on your buoyancy.

If you are in shallower water, the change is much greater. Imagine you are at a depth of 4m/~12ft, and you ascend to 2m/~6ft. The pressure would change from 1.4bar/Ata to 1.2bar/ata. That works out as a change of close to 15%. This much bigger percentage change has a bigger impact on your buoyancy, so you need more skill to deal with it.

What perfect Buoyancy looks like?

If in 4ft/1.2 meters of water you can execute frog kicks, helicopter turns, and back kicks without part of your body touching the floor or breaking the surface, or disturbing the floor, then you have become a buoyancy master! Bear in mind this includes your fins never breaking the surface when executing maneuvers.

Master Your Trim

Perfect buoyancy requires perfect trim. When trimmed out perfectly, you are in the ideal position to glide around effortlessly and hover perfectly all the time. The perfect trim is lying horizontal with your knees bent. This profile means you are the most “hydrodynamic” when moving forward, enabling you to conserve air and effort while swimming.

Being properly weighted means that when trimmed out, your body will stay in its position underwater. You will neither tilt nor rotate. You can perfect your weight by moving a small amount around your scuba rig!

Perfect Your Propulsion Techniques

The key to having good buoyancy and high-level skills is to have perfect propulsion techniques. All excellent divers, whether photographers, technical, recreational, or anything else, have all mastered the various propulsion techniques.

Frog Kicking

The primary propulsion method of most Instructors, technical divers, and cave divers, the frog kick is the most efficient and effortless way to move around underwater. When done correctly, it also causes minimal disturbance to the seafloor.

Executing the frog kick is simple, although it requires practice not only to perfect the technique but also to build up the muscle strength in your calves to perform it for long periods. Performing the kick starts in a perfectly trimmed position, with your knees at 90 degrees and your ankle relaxed. Like a frog, you open your legs, rotate your ankles, and kick by bringing your legs together and returning to the start position.

While it may feel and look like the kick from breaststroke swimming, frog kicking is not. When swimming, you push your feet back, while when frog kicking, you use your ankles to scoop and push the water back in the last part of the motion!

Helicopter Turns

Turning around in relatively small spaces, especially if you are holding a bulky camera, can be a little challenging. Mastering the helicopter turn lets you rotate in place using only your legs, leaving your hands free to stay in control of your camera gear. Once you have perfected the technique, you should be able to rotate 360 degrees around a central point without any forward, backward, or sideways movement.

Executing a helicopter turn is similar to a frog kick in some ways. Instead of using both legs to execute the kick, you only use one. However, the main difference is how you use your ankles to direct the force of the stroke. In a frog kick, the power is directed backward; however, with a helicopter turn, you use your ankle to direct the power of the kick sideways. At the same time, you slide your other leg in the direction of travel.

Mastering the Helicopter turn takes some time and patience. You should already have developed your buoyancy skills and got comfortable with airway control. Initially, you may find that you have an urge to use your hands to “help” you turn. Try and resist this, and with time, you will be able to change direction completely while doing something else with your hands.

Back Kicking

One of the best ways of dealing with confined spaces, whether in a wreck or in a coral head, is combining frog kicks with the back kick lets you get in and out of a confined space with ease. Executing proper back kicks lets you exit the space without trying to turn around in a tight space, which can cause serious damage to corals or yourself if you hit a sharp edge inside a wreck.

Proper execution of a back kick is very similar to a frog kick, only in reverse. Starting with your ankles together, extend your legs backward (while keeping your knees bent). Ensuring you keep your legs together. Once they are extended, use a slicing motion to push yourself back in the water. You should finish the stroke in the same position you started in.

Back kicking is the hardest of all propulsion techniques to master. You should already be proficient with the frog kick, and helicopter turns before attempting the back kick. One thing to look out for is that when you first try back kicking, you can often find yourself going back and up and the same time. If this happens, it is because the angel of your fins is not perfect, and you are generating power both backward and downwards, pushing you up. Adjusting your ankles will soon eliminate the upward motion.

Learn to use your lungs

Divers who mastered buoyancy use their lungs to control minor changes in depth on a regular basis. This gives them almost perfect depth control and reduces their air consumption. Using your lungs is pretty straightforward and does not involve holding your breath. If you want to ascend a little (1 or 2 feet/ 0.6m), simply breathe in a little deeper than normal, and you will rise. If you want to descend a little, just exhale a little deeper than you normally would, and you short start to drop a little.

Using your lungs is the icing on your buoyancy cake. It only works well if you are already perfectly neutrally buoyant. It will be ineffective if you are slightly negative or positive and compensate with your fining technique. This also gives you a clue that if you can’t get it to work well for you, you are probably not “quite there yet” with your other buoyancy skills.

Awareness is Key to Success

Awareness of your buoyancy and surroundings in the water is crucial to developing perfect buoyancy. If you are not aware of what is besides, behind, underneath, or above you, it is very easy to move in the wrong direction and either damage yourself, break coral or injure marine life.

Also, awareness, whether you are slightly negative or positive, is important. Do you need to add air to your BCD, take some out, or can you just use your lungs? Perfect buoyancy requires constant small adjustments that become automatic, and you don notice them. Buoyancy perfection is a little like driving a car where you subconsciously make minuscule adjustments to the steering wheel to keep your vehicle in lane.

Unfortunately, the closer you get to perfect buoyancy and the harder it is for you to see the area where you need to work and where you need to improve your buoyancy. It is common for divers to develop slightly bad buoyancy habits, the perfect example being diving slightly negative. Diving slightly negative is quite common, and most divers compensate by having their kicks move them slightly upward and forward. They can become so good at this that they don’t notice the issue until they try and stop and use a camera and start to sink.

The perfect way to figure out if you have achieved perfect buoyancy is to stop! As you swim, stop moving and look at your computer; you should not move up or down; you should simply stay stationary. If you move up or down, then your buoyancy is slightly “off,” and you need to tweak it accordingly.