Deep wreck photography

[Ingemar Lundgren]

We have a very talented photographer on the Forum named Kimmo Hagman. Check out his portfolio @ www.kimmohagman.com (http://www.kimmohagman.com/),

The below picture is photographed by Kimmo at over 100m depth. This is very impressive and his pictures of the Maidan are some of the best deep wreck pictures that i have seen. (I hope you donīt mind me publishing your picture in the forum Kimmo)
http://www.goredsea.com/cmsmedia/images/Large/MaidanStern2ByKimmoHagman.jpg

Being a photographer my self i would be interested to hear some details about the shots. What camera did you use, what ISO, shutter speed etc?

Looking forward to hearing more about these amazing pictures. There are more of the Maidan pictures here. http://www.goredsea.com/en_magazine-archivebyissues-article-southredseawreckofssmaidanfound-magazinearticle.aspx?monthid=february2004

[Ingemar Lundgren]

I would love to get a discussion going about low light/deep wreck photography here. There are some very talented photographers on this forum. We have Erik Bjurström, Jocke Tenglin, Kimmo Hagman, the legendary Dan Burton, David Reha and many more. I do hope you all can take the time to share your knowledge! My self have been known to produce some half assed result so maybe i should share some of my 0.01 cents?

First of all capturing a good photograph in low light under water is very challenging. UW photography is perhaps considered the most difficult art of photography. Add to this combining it with "tech diving" and the complications it adds, loads of tanks, decompression, the low light associated with depth and i guess even if you are not a photographer or even a diver you realize that it is pretty damn hard to capture a decent picture. Although i am not at all one of the best in my field i feel i am able to pass on a few advice to the would be deep diving photographer.

First of all you have to decide if you are going to try to capture the ambient light or not. If not just go for a low ISO and an ideal F stop for your lens (F 8 is usually ideal for picture quality) and chose a shutter speed as fast as your camera can sync. Most modern cameras can sync 1/250 now adays. If you want to see some of the models light in the picture you should go down in F stop and or speed. Usually F 5.6 and 125/sec is enough to capture some light from a 18 Wat Halcyon HID.

Using this method in low light conditions will result in mediocre results though. In the Baltic Sea and many other areas we find that the ambient light on very preferable conditions at 50m gives about 1 second exposure at ISO 1600!

How do we deal with this? Well that is what i hope i can get my fellow photographer friends to share. It is far from easy! If you are after half assed results and donīt care much about pristine sharpness you will be fine. But if you are an aspiring magazine photographer you should take more care. Bellow is a picture shot by my self @ F2.8 ISO 1600 1 second using Fuji 800 Print film. I was using a 16mm fish eye lens, i will get back to the importance of the lens later..

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This picture is one of my best ones technically ever so if you have any bad opinions about it i am going to kick our ass :-)

Seriously it was more difficult to capture than you might perhaps think. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of photography knows it is pretty damn hard to get a picture sharp at 1 second shutter speed hand held right? Why the hell do i chose a 1 second speed? Well, first of all i wanted to capture some of the ambient light and second of all i wanted to get the correct exposure from the Halcyon HMI light coming from above. Combining HMI lights with ambient light and through in some strobe slaves can give you some spectacular results. Sorry guys, just buying a housing for your SLR or even DSLR ain't gonna cut it, you need light, and loads of it and that is gonna cost you a shit load of money. There is no magical short cuts, you need light and you need as darn much as you can afford! The halcyon HMI is fantastic, especially for video but i have to tell you that for my kind of still photography it has some pretty damn good uses as a fill light and some times even as a main light, it is that powerful! If it haven't been for my good friend Per Anderssonīs commitment to invest in these lights i would never had captured this picture, thanks Per and thanks Halcyon for keeping in the forefront of lighting technology underwater!

To understand the difficult parts of capturing this photograph you will have to understand some of the fundamentals of photography. Low light means you have to go down on shutter speed and/or F stop to get the correct exposure. What is F stop? My fingers ain't used to typing this much so iīm afraid iīm gonna have to cut it short. The F stop is basically how much the lens opens ,the lower you go in F stop the more light your camera will capture. It is also called aperture. An F stop of F2.8 is considered wide open on some of the most expensive lenses and will capture twice as much of light then an F stop of 4 which is the lowest on some of the cheaper lenses. There is a correlation between F-stop and shutter speed.. F2,8-F 4stop is one stop and 4-5,6 is one F stop and 5,6-8 is one stop etc. What this means is basically that you can either get the same exposure @2.8 F stop and 1/25 shutter speed or 4@1/12 shutter speed or 5.&@1/6 shutter speed. If you ain't got he hang of what I'm talking about donīt worry, you are not retarded, I'm just going over this really quick. Mind you, there have been books written about the subject.. Damn it, this is getting a lot harder to explain then i set out o.. Anyway, the higher you go in F-stop the more depth of field you will get. What is depth of field? If you have a very wide depth of field your image will be sharp from front to end. If you have a shallow depth of field your image will have a sharp subject but blurred background as in a macro shot or portrait shot. An F2.8 will give you a very shallow depth of field and a F22 will give you a very wide depth of field. Ideally you would wan to have most parts of your UW picture sharp right? But if you want to capture some ambient light you have to trade some of that in.

Fuck the technical shit right? Lets get down to practical photography.

What would happen if i would choose an F stop of F5.6 and shutter speed of say 125/sec on the same subject and lighting conditions? Here is an example of that.
http://www.ulfman.se/bstd/images/projects/ratten.JPG

As you can see none of the ambient light is captured and although the picture is cool and all it lacks the impact of the previous one, don't you think? Opening up the aperture (F-Stop) and going for a slow shutter speed in these conditions means we can capture some of the the ambient light and the true magic of the underwater world. A strobe light will only reach as far as it does and thatīs usually a meter or two. Keeping the light off camera you can avoid back scatter and you can combine multiple lights to reach a lot further as in this example lit from behind by a slave strobe and on camera flash on a really long arm. It is better then half assed good ain't it? What made the difference was the amount of light..

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Well where where i now? I believe i lost my self. Hmm. And it is late and my wine bottle is nearly empty so i guess i have to call it quits and get back on this some other day. In the mean while i hope some of the very talented photographers on this forum can start sharing there shit!.

[Ahmed Adly]

You see Ingemar, the trouble with deep photography, is that it really has no audiance as far as photo galleries go.
An audiance can only been shown a picture of a wreck deep under water after they have been told the significance of the pictured wreck before hand. So a person who is just going through pictures will most probably find himself flipping past the deep ones without much thought.

Because pictures must make one feel to gain an experiance, then a photo of a deep wreck would be quite lifeless.

I think the only real way to document a deep wreck along with a photo is within a real well thought out text. The a picture has to be taken with such a text in mind, to be able to get the right perspective.

But, haphazardly snapping away at a wreck at such depths CANNOT produce a result.

[Jocke Tenglin]

God thread Ingmar!
You mentioned a few "camerafreaks" and I feel honoured to be among the ones you talk about. Some other good wreck/cave photografers are:

Leigh Bishop http://www.deepimage.co.uk/
Wes Skiles http://www.karstproductions.com/KarstStore/storemain.html
Alex Dawson http://www.dawson-photo.com/
Julian Calverley http://www.juliancalverley.com/folio/personal.htm
Some of my own work can be found at http://www.fisheyephoto.fotosidan.se/I usually use Leigh Bishops method with fast film (800-3200 ASA) and donīt use flash on wideangle wreck photografy. I even use tripod sometimes to be able to shoot long shuttertimes (>1/30s).
This is a tripod result.
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Shutterspeed is about 10-15s. In land photografy shutterspeed longer than 1/40s is considered hard to handhold. My experiences have told me it is possible to handhold down to about 1/2-1s. Longer than this needs some kind of support (tripod). The tripod I use is a carsupport (donīt know the eng word for it)
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The photografers mentioned above donīt necessary work in lo light conditions. I know Bishop usually do and his work is amazing. A few of the others use similar film and methods thought. The agfa scala b/w slidefilm is a very good fast film. It can be pushed to 1600ASA but unfortunally has to be developed in Germany, Uk or USA.
One scala picture from Norwegian waters.
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The grain is the backdraw with fast film. The more light sensitive the bigger grain. Here 3200ASA:
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Some usefull things about deep wreck photografy:

Importent not to shoot to the surface with fast film since the sun will eat the picture nomatter how cloudy it is.
If flash is used be sure to let it go in the end of the cameras mirrorperiod. (Can be adjusted on most cameras)
Tell your team how you would like them to act. Models? Angle? Light?
Donīt let them shine directly in the camera since this gives bad results. They should not look towards the camera at all if possible but in the direction of their light. This makes more interesting pics.Here is another ex of tripodshooting. The only thing I dont like is the position/trim of the diver.
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[Ingemar Lundgren]

Thanks Jocke for sharing this excellent info. Very nice pictures indeed and your approach to shooting deep wrecks are quite different to mine and very interesting. Very nice "mood" in the first picture. I will get back here with more questions for you soon.

Hopefully i can sum all this up later and post an article about deep wreck photography on the site. Maybe we could even cooperate and write an article about it for magazines? Get some extra money out of those pictures is never a bad idea.

[rbrt]

This is a tripod result.
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Shutterspeed is about 10-15s.


That is a fantastic picture. Very cool.

/Robert

[Kuba Grabowski]

What could happend with propeler from this wreck?
;)


k

[Jocke Tenglin]

The propeller was salvaged just after the ship sunk. Back at the time for the war there was a lack of metal in war industry.
Best regards
Joakim

[Kuba Grabowski]

thanks,
How deep is down there?
k

[Ahmed Adly]

Currently I am in the market to buy a housing for a good SLR (preferably nikon). Most importantly, it must take a good SLR and be able to dive to at least 120m

Ahmed