To me the sharks are something of the most beautiful and exciting subjects I can get in my viewer. So it is for many, so they are a selling subject in magazines and appear quite often. You can get the impression that they are easy to photograph. But they are rarely seen by divers and very shy. So there are relatively few really good pictures of them. When the underwater photographer sees them he has to know what to do not to miss the opportunity. That is what this article is about.
Shark photography

You can not trust luck to find them so the first requirement is to find a place where sharks are common, where you can be quite sure to meet them. Talk to other divers experienced to those waters. Places where sharks are usually found is at a points where the water is deep and there is a current.
They are generally difficult to approach and if they come close enough for a good shot it is usually a very short visit. With close enough I mean at least to be able to fill the frame with a meter and a half of shark with a 35mm Nikonos lens. A longer lens than that will loose a lot of contrast. To get them close enough for any longer period of time you need to bait them. It is the only way to get a reaso

nable amount of good pictures of sharks. The first question I often get then is: "Is this not very dangerous" ?. We have only on rare occasions been bothered by solitary, territorial sharks not in connection with bating. That risk is always there if you dive in waters with grey reef sharks who are very territorial. Once I saw my brother Lars below me kneeling down with his camera in front of a beautiful soft coral. Suddenly, out of the blue, came a shark behind him. With incredible speed it rammed him in the back of his head and took off. Lars made a somersault into the coral but was unhurt

Many beleive the bait has to be blood. That will not attract the common sharks at all. What you need is fish. The more rotten the better. Sharks just love the smell of rotten fish. The secret is to just lure the sharks to come close with the smell of fish in the water. To keep the fish in the open will just create a frenzy with a mess of sharks swimming very fast, impossible for good portraits. If you let them take the bait they disappear and the show is over. You have to keep the fish in a bag and hide it under a rock after you have made a small hole in the bag and squeezed out some fishjuice so they only

pick up the smell and keeps circling in front of you. After a while they may lose interest when the scent gets too diluted and start too withdraw. Then you have to squeeze out some more. If you let them come too close to the bait they will get too excited for good photography. So you need to plan it well. You don't need any big fish. Put it in a double plastic bag. Let it "mature" in the sun for a while with some water in it and become juicy so it will give off a strong trail of fish scent in the water. The bag must be absolutely sealed so not to give off any smell prematurely. To make you feel more secure, select a place where you can withdraw with your back to the reef. A good current is necessary to make the sharks pick up the scent trail and to make their swimming direction predictable. They always swim against the scent trail. To see the sharks pick up the scent is fascinating. Their swimming suddenly becomes excited and they line up one after the other swimming against the scent trail. They will come all the way to the source of the scent and if you want you can touch them. They are only interested in the fish and will not harm you. With this technique you can almost train the sharks to act like models in front of you and you can plan your pictures in detail.

Use 20mm up to 35mm lenses so you can get them at a little bit of distance when they swim calmly. Autofocus with focus tracking ability is a big advantage because they are constantly moving. Shutter speeds of 1/125 or more is necessary to avoid blurr. This means using a camera in a housing. Nikonos only synchronises the strobe at 1/90. To compensate for these fast times and get a small enough F/ Stop 100 ASA film is necessary. TTL metering of the flasch often fails if the shark is completely surrounded by water in the picture. The reflecting surface will be too small and the TTL will overexpose. Expose for ambient light and use manual fill in flasch. Remember the big contrast between the sharks back and his belly. The back is dark gray and the belly and mouth white. You should aim to get the mouth properly exposed which means underexposing the back. A slightly upwards angle is good with the shark contrasting against the sunlight. Shooting down is a waist of time since the back

of the shark will not have any contrast to the water or the bottom. It is good to go so close that the eye expression is clearly visible. A straight frontal angle, "en face", is very exciting but difficult since the shark always turns his side towards the diver "listening" with its sensitive sideline. In spite of hard efforts I have so far not got a perfect such picture.
With a diver in the same picture you can raise interest. With the right location regarding the angle of the sunlight and the direction of the current which determines the movements of the sharks, and with a competent model, you can achieve excellent results.
Because of the well known and exciting shape of the shark, plain silhoutte shots against the light with divers has a lot of impact.

A more sure way of getting sensational pictures is to use doublexposure technique. That means composing a picture in two sessions. Before you dive make a mark on the film so you will know exactly the starting position. After taking a series of pictures of for example a diver in the upper part of the frame with sunlight and the lower part underexposed you go up and rewind the film to the initial mark and then you go back and take a series of sharks with strobelight in the lower part of the frame.

Everything I have now described is only possible with the Grey Reef Shark because they are relatively bold in the presence of divers. Most other species are too shy.

Text and pictures Erik Bjurström