An Unusual Underwater Photography Seminar

Mastering a variety of skills is required to become an accomplished underwater photographer. No question about that. In an effort to help underwater shooters master the needed skills many seminars focus on a variety of in-water techniques and the preferred equipment. Those seminars are extremely beneficial.

But some of the skills and techniques that need to be mastered involve things you do when you set up your camera system before a dive. This includes everything from setting certain camera menu items correctly to properly maintaining o-ring seals and testing an “automatic exposure” system to be sure it is working properly. On the other end of your dives, you need to download, backup images, edit and keyword images so you can find them quickly. And you need to maintain your equipment so that it works as desired on future dives.

The in-water topics covered in this seminar focus primarily on composition. But I will touch on a variety of shooting techniques.

Fred Dion of Backscatter East, a personal mentor when it comes to keeping my camera systems in good working order, will help lead the seminar when we delve into camera system care and maintenance. During this part of the seminar we will consider pre-dive, in-water, and post-dive aspects of camera system care and maintenance.

After that, we are going to look at a variety of images and learn about how people view images. This involves group participation and is sure to be fun. We will start with some of my images. But I would like seminar participants to bring three to five jpegs on a “jump drive” for review. You can put your name on your images or you can maintain anonymity.

In either case, we are going to project and discuss these images. The point is to help attendees learn about how others see photographs, and specifically learn about what other people like and what they find to be detrimental when viewing images.

I have led this type of image review before, and participants have always told me afterwards that they learned a lot about how to improve their images from the group comments.

Boston Sea Rovers
Boston Sea Rovers