Tips & Tricks For Better Underwater Night Photography

There is nothing quite like underwater night photography, whether you are using a camera in underwater housing or a waterproof iPhone case! As impressive as the underwater world is during the day, it is truly magical at night. Capturing images at night is not that much more challenging than shooting images during the day. However, the darkness does present challenges and opportunities. Great underwater night photography not only yields stunning photos but also, more often than not, you can capture creatures and critters that are never seen during the day!

Night Photography is the only way to capture images of nocturnal creatures like the Spanish Dancer. Image courtesy of L. Dinraths

Which Photography are you Doing?

Before you embark on your night photography journey, you need to decide what type of night photography you are doing. Underwater imaging at night can be split into traditional and Blackwater. Traditional night photography is diving and taking images on regular dive sites where you would dive during the day. These include diving on reefs, wrecks, and such.

Blackwater photography is a newer field and involves diving in the (shallow) open ocean at night, where the water is black. This type of photography is aimed mainly at capturing images of tiny critters and plankton that are in the water column. Blackwater photography is more specialized, requiring more gear and experience, and is not the focus of this article. This article will focus on tips and techniques to improve your traditional underwater night photography.

Plan Your Dive

Before embarking on any night photo dive, you need to plan your dive. Planning a night photo dive involves much more than the typical max depth and bottom time plan. You need to have a good mental image of the dive site and what you will expect to encounter. Also, you should know what to expect to encounter and have a rough idea of where to find them.

Knowing that a coral pinnacle has sleeping parrot fish or that a specific coral head tends to have Spanish dancers is a big help. Expecting to see something means you can generally spot it much quicker and then proceed to shoot it. Diving a site with minimal knowledge of flora and fauna will result in you wasting time and missing some great photo opportunities.

Knowing where to find subjects like this Stargazer makes night photography easy. Image courtesy of L. Dinraths.

Generally, unless you have dived a specific site regularly and are familiar with it, diving your target site earlier in the day is good practice. This gives a sense of familiarity and comfort, making navigating the site later that night much easier. If you are lucky, you may also spot some critters that will make excellent subjects that night!

Be a Comfortable Night Diver

You will not be a competent night photographer if you are not a comfortable, competent night diver. Think about how many daytime dives you had before your first adventure with a camera. You were happy and comfortable with your gear and surroundings. The same philosophy applies to night diving.

Before venturing underwater with a camera, ensure you are comfortable in the water at night. Reaching your torches and other equipment should be second nature. You need to be able to find every piece of critical gear just by reaching for it using your muscle memory. Adding the stress of a camera if you are not fully comfortable will just make things more complicated.

While this may have some safety implications, it will have photographic implications. Reaching around to find torches and inflators is a surefire way to ensure that you are not focused on your images, and the results will show! So make sure you are comfortable with night diving before commencing night photography!

Understand Your Lighting Options

Understanding your lighting options is key to producing great night underwater images. While you will often dive with a small torch to help you see and spot stuff. When lighting your shots, you need to understand the different effects different lights produce.

You can use strobes, lights, or even snoot (which offer a very narrow focused beam). Deciding on what image you are trying to capture will point you toward which light source to use. Imagine a lizardfish or blenny. While not the most exciting subject, they can still produce a dramatic image.

For instance, if the blenny is perched in a unique position, and you want to capture its whole body, the object it was perched on, and even some of the background. In that case, you will likely use a strobe since it will give you a relatively wide field of illumination. On the other hand, if you want to capture a smaller area and want to play with shadow for composition, then you could opt for a light that you can position for dramatic effect and create shadows where you want them.

Although small, let us assume you want to capture just the face of the blenny! With most of the image focused on the eyes and mouth. In that case, a snoot may be your best option. Since you can fine-tune your lighting and light up the part of the blenny you want to capture.

With so many lighting options spending some time gaining an understanding of how they work and how you can best use them will bring your night photography technique on in leaps and bounds.

Focus On the Small Stuff

Whether using underwater housing or a waterproof iPhone case. Taking pictures of bigger things underwater at night is a complex endeavor due to the lighting considerations. In fact, in some professional situations, multiple divers are used carrying lights to capture one image.

When it comes to night photography, medium and small subjects are ideal. Also, the less a subject moves, the better. Small pieces of coral, nudibranchs, or even snoozing fish make excellent subjects. You can take your time to “sight your shot” before snapping away. As a bonus, if you don’t particularly like your first effort, you can snap a few more.

This allows you to practice and improve your technique by taking multiple images of the same subject. As you manipulate your settings, you can see the different results they produce with the same subject.

While sticking to small and medium-sized subjects may feel a little limiting, it is not. There are millions of critters, creatures, fish, and corals you can enjoy and master your underwater photography technique before ever considering trying to snap bigger stuff!

Experiment With Your Underwater Housing For Success

The key to underwater image success is experimentation. With darkness and various light sources, you have various options and settings to choose from to take the perfect image. For instance, experiment with shooting a nudibranch using your strobe, torch, or snoot. What effect does moving the position of your torch produce, or should you have your strobes wide to the side or above the subject? Each will produce different effects. Learning what works for your setup and compositions takes time and practice.

To add a layer of complexity, producing images is not simply a matter of light heads. But also your camera setting. Great photographers know how their shutter speed interacts with different light sources as well as its aperture. Constant experimentation with your setting using your underwater housing and trial and error is the only way you will develop and understand and be able to marry the theory and practice of underwater night photography.

The key to successful experimentation is simplicity. Choose simple dive sites with easy conditions. (a nice shallow tropical reef shore dive with minimal current is about as good as it gets). Then choose a simple stationary subject and spend some time snapping away with various settings. You will be surprised how much you can get to know your gear and understand it after one or two dives.

Master Composition and Postproduction

Due to a large number of variables, you need to pay particular attention to composition and postproduction when taking underwater night images. Using strobes can highlight backscatter more prominently than during the day. At the same time, the loss of lighting can leave backgrounds dull, gloomy, and washed out.

A cuttlefish strikes a pose at night. Image courtesy of L. Dinraths

Learning to shoot images that maximize the features of the night is key to producing some stunning images. Shooting slightly up, for instance, can give you a lovely pitch-black background. That makes the color and features of the subject stand out. At the same time, these types of images can suffer from backscatter. However, with some postproduction, you can easily remove them to return to an endless sea of a black background.

Due to the limitations of light penetration (from strobe or torch), it is great to shoot with a shallow depth of field. This technique can create a great composition, emphasizing the main object in the foreground while gently blurring and slowly fading out the background. This draws the eyes of the viewer to the beauty of the main object.

Cropping in postproduction is also very useful since it allows you to focus on the photo's main object while eliminating parts that are poorly lit and possibly out of focus. While you can take many daylight images without much worry, taking stunning night images requires a little more thought about composition, light, and a tiny element of postproduction!